The Token Black Market

Chinese resellers are offering Claude API tokens at 70–90% below official Anthropic prices through a shadow API economy built on transit stations — proxy services that route requests from geo-restricted users to Anthropic and OpenAI. The ecosystem relies on bulk account registration using anti-detect browsers, cheap SMS verification bypass, and AI-generated fake IDs (passports, driver's licenses) that pass KYC checks. Cost savings come from pooling Claude Max plan accounts, substituting cheaper or fake models while claiming premium ones, stolen credit cards, and selling real user query-answer pairs to Chinese AI labs for model training. The author also theorizes that malicious npm packages may be silently hijacking developer machines as mini-VPNs to route transit station traffic, explaining mysterious Claude usage limit depletion reported by many users.