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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

>They achieve this by reselling capacity from pooled Claude Max 5x accounts, payments fraud, and also reselling the model output to various Chinese labs.

>Here's one token reseller, they're offering Opus 4.8 for a 93% discount below official API rates: https://yunwu.ai/pricing?keyword=claude

But is it cheaper than getting your own account? Otherwise this sounds like the "anthropic/openai are losing gazillions of dollars because they're selling $1k worth of tokens for $100" line that's commonly trotted out by AI bears.

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It's very difficult for people to create personal Anthropic accounts from China. Anthropic blocks Chinese bank cards, so people must pay with a foreign bank card, which they likely don't have. And even if they manage to set one up, they have to access it via VPN, which eventually gets the account flagged. They then have to complete identity verification, which most Chinese users are unable to pass.

There's a similar Claude resale market going on in Russia. On Funpay they are selling Claude tokens for roughly 20-30x cheaper than official Anthropic API pricing.

And phone number verification too? So that's 3 hurdles to jump to just get opus.

for verification you can buy phone number for $1 easily.

Doesn't ~every phone number verification service check the telephone provider and only allow from a select whitelist of residential providers?

With esim and virtual credit card services, why would that be a blocker? Who's got a landline these days?

You can easily get lots of esims for $5-10 months in EU / UK or just for free.

I think it is really good to start to use CAMARA GEOLOCATION for it. A fraudstear could be intercepted if is not under the MNO antenna.

Phone verification services exist to give you a real number for the purpose of passing this kind of verification.

They even have APIs for these services. They make money since they can use the same number to verify different things.

> Claude and ChatGPT are both blocked in China

So it's presumably cheaper than attempting to spin up your own method of circumventing the blocks.

You can use it as an API unlike the subscription.

Maybe these resellers are using stolen American credit card numbers? Reselling Claude access seems to be a nice way to launder the money.

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