It's really common in China where OpenAI and Anthropic models are firewalled. There was a joke that Chinese people didn't realize how cheap DeepSeek was, because they already were using resold ChatGPT/Opus tokens at that price.

Here is a more detailed article about how it works:

https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens...

I expect most of the use to be for bulk data processing or desperate founders who don't care, not for agentic coding use at promising startups.

If your startup needs to run a million records of something, especially public data, through an LLM to extract the data you need, using bootleg tokens to shrink the bill starts feeling tempting.

If you're concerned about the data leaking, the biggest risk is that the API backends are quietly routing your requests to a cheaper model. You might be trying to buy Opus tokens but get Deepseek Flash responses.

So what? The world is more trustworthy than you can imagine. I have bought over 30 GPUs over the internet, sight unseen. From around the world and every single one has arrived good. I have also gotten over 20 from marketplace and the same. Use your common sense, from conversation and everything else, you can often separate the scammers from real folks.

I mean reselling items bought with stolen credit cards have been a thing for at least 20 years

I'd rather trust a third party with no reputation than a well known Misanthropic company led by a man whose wife was asking Epstein for investment. They are even less trustworthy then ClosedAI.