An Inside Look at the Relay Market Powering Token Resellers and Fraud | Vectoral &larr; All posts threat-research llm-security<br>An Inside Look at the Relay Market Powering Token Resellers and Fraud<br>June 28, 2026 · Matt Lenhard · 9 min read<br>Share

My Story

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about token fraud, a problem I first stumbled upon while working as a software engineer on an AI gateway.

We faced constant abuse. At first it was free-credit abuse, where users spun up accounts en masse. Then it was our support chatbot. I started talking to friends about it and hearing stories of companies losing millions of dollars to abuse each day.

The abuse took a number of different shapes, and the abusers were relentless. I came to realize that the problem was much bigger than us. A new form of fraud had emerged, and it had become endemic to the token economy.

While researching where the abuse was coming from, I stumbled onto a Chinese forum where operators openly discussed the relays and their methods. My notes on the industry and its players are below.

So What Is a Relay?

A relay — or “transfer station” — is essentially a service that proxies traffic to U.S. models, often at a deep discount. For example, one operator’s price-comparison site listed a package that bought the equivalent of $3,333 worth of official Anthropic credit for 425 RMB — roughly $0.13 of usage per $1 spent.

Effective rate<br>$0.13<br>of official usage per $1 spent

Sample package<br>$3,333<br>of Anthropic credit for just 425 RMB

Top discount<br>97.8%<br>off official pricing, at the cheapest relay

To make that concrete, here’s how far below official pricing the relays we track actually run, ranked by discount:

#ProviderMedian discount from official list price<br>01Now Coding

97.8%<br>02I Code Easy

97.1%<br>03Claude ZZ

96.6%<br>04Doro

96.4%<br>05UoCode

96.3%<br>06ZeroCode

94.9%<br>07AiYa

94.9%<br>08HongMaCC

94.2%<br>09Right Code

94.1%<br>10BUZZ

94.1%

See all 49

How the Market Works

The ecosystem runs four layers deep, from the merchants sourcing raw accounts down to the developers buying cheap tokens:

01 Upstream 卡商 / 号商<br>Card & account merchants — virtual credit cards built to pass U.S. and European billing checks, plus bulk-registered accounts.

02 Midstream 账号池<br>Account pools — aggregate hundreds of upstream accounts, manage tokens and rate limits, handle failover, and expose a single API.

03 Downstream 中转站<br>Relays / transfer stations — wrap the pool's API in a clean, billed, Chinese-language product and compete on price.

04 End users<br>Developers, startups, and SaaS chasing cheap inference — plus commercial buyers running model distillation.

Upstream

Sitting at the top are the card merchants (卡商) and account merchants (号商). They sell virtual credit cards designed to pass U.S. and European billing checks, along with bulk-registered accounts.

Midstream

In the middle sit the account pools (账号池) . A pool aggregates dozens or hundreds of upstream accounts, manages their authentication tokens and rate limits, handles failover when accounts get flagged, and exposes a single API surface that downstream relays can consume.

The inventory isn’t only model-lab accounts. Alongside direct OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google credentials are accounts harvested from the application layer.

Much of the forum’s activity centers on “reverse-engineered” access to tools like Kiro and antigravity, which are consumer products, not lab APIs. To a pool, it makes no difference whether a token comes from a lab or from an app built on one; anything that resells or exposes a model is a target.

Downstream

Downstream sit the relay / transfer stations themselves — the consumer-facing layer. They wrap the pool’s API in a clean Chinese-language product, handle billing and invoicing, run customer-support WeChat groups, and compete on price.

End users

At the bottom are individual Chinese developers, small startups, and mid-sized SaaS companies hunting for cheap inference — as well as some larger commercial buyers using the infrastructure for model distillation.

In practice these layers blur. Many operators run both the pool and the relay, and the forum’s own participants often use “pool” and “transfer station” interchangeably.

The Software Behind the Relays

Almost every relay I’ve looked at runs on one of two open-source projects: one-api or new-api .

Both are OpenAI-compatible gateways. An operator deploys the panel and adds a set of channels (渠道) . Each channel represents a provider plus a pool of API keys. The panel exposes a single endpoint that matches the OpenAI API, so buyers just point their existing SDK at the relay’s URL. On every request it pulls a key from the pool, forwards it upstream, returns the response, and deducts quota priced by usage times a multiplier (倍率) . It manages the users, tokens, pricing tiers, logs, and billing.

new-api is a more actively developed fork of one-api , and the difference is mostly commerce: it ships with self-service payment and recharge, plus image,...