The AI Account Reseller Ecosystem

In my past articles, I covered the Relay Market and the AI Credit Reseller Market. In this piece, I’m going to dive into how relays actually source accounts.

Several individual brokers and marketplaces focus on account trading. These brokers handle things like KYC verification and sourcing foreign cards that pass necessary checks.

While researching this, I came across one of my most interesting findings so far: a company that branded itself as a software design studio. From the outside looking in, everything appeared normal.

It was registered in the UK, had a corporate address, and seemed benign. Under the hood, it was a Claude account reseller. Below is an email in which the company was looking to source 1,000+ Claude accounts per month.

There are three somewhat distinct types of buyers for these accounts: foreign model labs sourcing accounts for distillation, token resellers (relays) hunting additional token supply, and consumers getting around geo restrictions or just wanting cheap access.

The Supply

You can buy pretty much any AI account. I included the major providers in the table below, but accounts are being bought and sold for all of the major coding agents, AI assistants, inference providers, and model labs.

The Demand

To get an idea of volume, one of the larger AI account marketplaces claims to be doing $28,000 a day.

本站日销20w左右，欢迎有实力的同行或kol合作 — “this site does about ¥200,000 in daily sales; we welcome capable peers or KOLs to cooperate.” That is roughly $28,000 a day.

The Players

There are a few websites dedicated to AI account sourcing, but most major account resellers seem to live in Telegram groups. You can also find accounts on some of the digital marketplace sites like Goofish.

AI HOME

AI HOME is a Telegram merchant I stumbled onto through an advertisement on NodeSeek. AI HOME is unusual in that it specifically advertises wholesale accounts to relay operators.

‼️pro20x成品号仅需200r，做中转站的老哥可以入手

“Pro 20x finished accounts, only ¥200 — brothers running relay stations can pick these up.”

I thought it was funny that on one of the advertisements they were called out for not actually being the cheapest.

The suppliers next door are all cheaper than yours, even though you’re the source.

henduohaopifa

henduohaopifa.com sells three Claude SKUs, five Grok, six ChatGPT, and one Gemini.

All of the Claude products here are recharge-based, which is typically for users looking to get around card and geo restrictions.

maihaoguanjia

The roughly sixty SKUs cover Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Cursor, Codex, Copilot, Warp, and MidJourney.

I thought maihaoguanjia was interesting because they specifically advertise KYC verification bypasses. I’m planning on taking a look at KYC verification services in a follow-up article.

zhanghao66

zhanghao66.com brands itself as the lowest-price wholesale AI account shop.

It carries 37 SKUs and offers volume-based discounts. Claude Max drops from ¥770 to ¥725 at thirty units.

Goofish

Goofish (闲鱼) is Alibaba’s consumer resale marketplace, essentially the Chinese Craigslist.

A search for “Claude Account” returns 306 listings.

Goofish doesn’t publish sales counts, but it does show a “wants” counter. The counters add up to about 11,000.

The median Claude Pro here is ¥150 against zhanghao66’s wholesale ¥128.

Interestingly, warranties are priced in. One seller has a no-warranty tier where, if the account gets banned, he offers a ¥10 refund.

It’s also interesting how corporate the market has become. One seller offers invoices and corporate bank transfer.

My favorite listing, at ¥999: 程序员副业，不接急单，谢谢 — “programmer’s side hustle, no rush orders, thanks.”

The zhanghao66 operator actually started here, before building his own site.

就像之前我自己做咸鱼，Gemini 找人拿货 30 一个，卖 99，爆单一天百单

“Like when I was doing Xianyu myself — I sourced Gemini accounts at ¥30 each, sold them at ¥99, and on a good day that was a hundred orders.”

I actually want through the trouble of registering as an IP agent in order to submit takedown claims at Goofish. That process probably deserves an entire post itself.

plati.market

Everything above is the Chinese side of the market. plati.market is the Russian equivalent. It’s a general digital-goods marketplace offering game keys, software licenses, accounts, and gift cards.

A search for “Claude” returns 436 listings from 210 distinct sellers, with a combined 254,000 displayed sales. The single largest listing has sold 88,084. ChatGPT is bigger still. One listing shows 115,207 sales.

The interesting part is the pricing. On plati, Claude sells for more than Anthropic charges.

That inverts the Chinese market, where the same subscriptions trade at a discount to list.

The Chinese shops sell wholesale into relays, where the whole point is to acquire tokens below cost and resell them.

Plati sells retail to individual Russian buyers who simply cannot get a card to clear.

How Accounts Are Sourced

Standard recharge: The seller takes an existing user account and buys or applies the subscription on the user’s behalf. This is sometimes credit card fraud, but often just a workaround for geo restrictions.

Finished accounts: The seller delivers credentials to an account that has already been registered and often subscribed.

Account takeovers: This is an emerging abuse tactic we’ve been tracking, and it’s becoming more common. Someone’s API key or session cookie gets picked up during a supply chain attack or via an info stealer and is then resold to a broker or relay directly.

Promotion/device arbitrage: Sellers monetize regional, carrier, handset, education, or device promotions.

Ridesharing: Accounts are aggregated and shared among a number of users.

Tokens Are a Currency

A core thesis when starting Vectoral was that tokens have become a pseudo-currency. This puts inference providers, labs, gateways, and coding agents in a similar bucket to banks.

A segment of the market that traditionally has not had to deal with fraud is now rife with it.

If someone gained access to my bank account, the damage would most likely be minimal. ACH is reversible, and any wire is going to immediately notify me. If they got my Anthropic account or API key, on the other hand …