China's Claude proxy market offers 90% discounts through fraud, data risk, and model swaps

A grey market of API resellers, known as 'transfer stations,' has emerged in China offering access to Western AI models like Claude at 60–90% below official prices. These services operate by mass-creating fraudulent accounts, routing requests through cheaper models without disclosure, and exposing user data — including prompts, code, and internal context — to proxy operators. In June 2026, Anthropic alleged that entities linked to Alibaba and Qwen used nearly 25,000 fake accounts to make 28.8 million requests over six weeks, apparently to distill Claude's capabilities into their own models. Similar accusations have previously been levelled at DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax. Analysts warn that the deeper issue is a lack of production visibility: most engineering teams cannot reliably verify which model served a request, what it cost, or where their data ended up.