Matt Lenhard discovered a massive token fraud ecosystem while building an AI gateway. Relays — or "transfer stations" — proxy traffic to U.S. models at extreme discounts; one price-comparison site listed $3,333 of Anthropic credit for 425 RMB, a 97.8% discount. The market runs four layers: upstream card/account merchants selling virtual cards that pass billing checks; midstream account pools aggregating hundreds of credentials (including reverse-engineered access to consumer tools); downstream relays wrapping pools in Chinese-language, billed APIs; and end users — developers, SaaS firms, and commercial buyers doing model distillation. Nearly every relay runs on one-api or its fork new-api, neutral open-source gateways that become illicit when stocked with stolen or pooled keys.

Abuse methods include free-trial automation, chargeback attacks, prepaid cards, open inference proxies, and "denial of wallet" spend-burning. The market is surprisingly mature: price-comparison sites, affiliate programs, and the top 10 relays pull 3.6 million monthly visits. hvoy.ai even runs a daily provably-fair lottery giving away 50 × $100 API keys, with 1,150 tickets competing in a recent round.

Providers face a relentless cat-and-mouse game. As labs roll out KYC and identity verification, Lenhard expects abuse to migrate rather than disappear. No clean fix exists.