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.
replyThere'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.
replyfor verification you can buy phone number for $1 easily.
replyDoesn't ~every phone number verification service check the telephone provider and only allow from a select whitelist of residential providers?
replyYou can easily get lots of esims for $5-10 months in EU / UK or just for free.
replyWith esim and virtual credit card services, why would that be a blocker? Who's got a landline these days?
reply> Claude and ChatGPT are both blocked in China
replySo it's presumably cheaper than attempting to spin up your own method of circumventing the blocks.
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replyYou can use it as an API unlike the subscription.
replyMaybe 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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