Beijing gray-market 'transfer stations' resell Claude at up to 90% off
Justgototheeffinmoon · reddit · 2026-10-05
Per The Information, six of 30 tenants in a single Haidian office building resell access to Anthropic's Claude, advertising openly on GitHub, Taobao, and Telegram.
These self-styled 'transfer stations' forward prompts from Chinese developers via overseas accounts and take RMB through WeChat/Alipay, some selling Claude tokens at 70–90% below official prices (1 RMB per $1 of API credit). Supply comes from farmed free credits, accounts bought with stolen and USDT-funded cards, and $200 Max plans subdivided across dozens of users. Model substitution is the hidden risk: pay for Opus and you may get a cheaper tier or a domestic model like Qwen relabelled as Claude; some proxies also harvest prompts and outputs for resale as training data.
Anthropic isn't unaware: in February it tied 24,000 fraudulent accounts to Chinese labs including DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax, yet the gray market keeps growing.
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