Chinese "transfer stations" bypass Anthropic's KYC to resell Claude API access at 5% to 10% of retail prices

A crazy blog.

Chinese developers are buying Claude access through gray-market API transfer stations that can sell tokens at 5% to 10% of official prices while hiding the real user from Anthropic.

A transfer station is a middle server that takes a user’s prompt, sends it to Claude through overseas accounts, returns the answer, and collects payment through WeChat or Alipay.

The transfer station collects many Claude accounts through free credits, discounted accounts, shared subscriptions, overseas payment workarounds, fake verification, or sometimes stolen-card accounts.

It connects all those accounts behind one proxy, so Chinese users do not talk to Anthropic directly and only pay the proxy in RMB.

The cheap price comes from account farming, free-credit abuse, resale of unused quota, subscription splitting, possible stolen cards, and a darker trade where user prompts and outputs become training data.

So the price hugely cheap not because Anthropic is giving a discount; it is cheap because the transfer station lowers its own cost and creates extra hidden revenue.

The user thinks they are buying cheap inference, but the proxy may swap Opus for weaker models, inflate token use, or store private code, tool calls, reasoning traces, and business data.

The proxy may store user prompts, code, outputs, and tool traces, then sell or reuse that data for model training.

This breaks a core assumption behind KYC, account bans, and abuse monitoring: the AI company sees the proxy, not the real person, so banning one account leaves the upstream supply chain alive.