A UK front company sourced 1,000+ Claude accounts a month

A UK-registered company presenting itself as a software design studio was emailing brokers to source more than 1,000 Claude accounts a month, according to threat researcher Matt Lenhard, writing for Vectoral. From the outside the firm looked ordinary, with a corporate address and a design-studio brand; its actual business was reselling Claude accounts.

At a glance

• Listing frequency varies sharply by product: ChatGPT Plus appears on 89% of the wholesale lists, Claude Pro on 74%, Claude Max 5x on 54% and Google AI Pro annual plans on 0.6%.
• Supply arrives through several routes: recharging a buyer's existing account, selling pre-registered credentials, reselling API keys and session cookies taken in supply chain attacks or by infostealers, promotion arbitrage and account ridesharing.
• Chinese shops sell below Anthropic's list price into relays, with wholesale Claude Pro at ¥128 against a ¥150 median on Goofish, while Russian buyers on plati.market pay a premium over list.

Fraud has arrived in a segment that never had to price it. Vectoral's thesis is that tokens now function as a pseudo-currency, which puts labs, gateways and coding agents in roughly the same position as banks, except that a compromised API key has no reversal path the way an ACH transfer does. The wholesale layer described here looks like the thing that keeps relay prices under list, which makes account hygiene a supply-side problem.

One shop claims about ¥200,000 in daily sales, roughly $28,000

Vectoral identifies three buyer groups behind the trade: foreign model labs sourcing accounts for distillation, relay operators hunting extra token supply, and consumers getting around geo restrictions or simply after cheap access. Volume is advertised in the open, with the zhanghao66 shop claiming about ¥200,000 in daily sales, roughly $28,000.

this site does about ¥200,000 in daily sales; we welcome capable peers or KOLs to cooperate.

Supply covers effectively every major coding agent, assistant, inference provider and model lab. Below the most common listings, SuperGrok appears on 26% of the lists surveyed, Claude Max 20x and ChatGPT Pro 5x on 24% each, ChatGPT Pro 20x on 15% and Grok Heavy on 13%.

zhanghao66 discounts Claude Max from ¥770 to ¥725 at thirty units

Most of the larger resellers operate through Telegram groups. AI HOME, a merchant Vectoral found through an advertisement on NodeSeek that drew 519 views, is unusual in pitching wholesale stock directly at relay operators. Commenters on the same ad noted that nearby suppliers were cheaper.

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

zhanghao66 carries 37 SKUs and prices by volume: Claude Max drops from ¥770 to ¥725 at thirty units. Its operator started out on Goofish, sourcing Gemini accounts at ¥30 and selling them at ¥99, with up to a hundred orders on a good day.

henduohaopifa lists three Claude SKUs, five Grok, six ChatGPT and one Gemini, with Claude Pro at ¥168, Max 5x at ¥880 and Max 20x at ¥1,320; all its Claude products are recharge-based. maihaoguanjia runs around sixty SKUs spanning Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Cursor, Codex, Copilot, Warp and MidJourney, and advertises KYC verification bypasses.

plati.market shows 254,000 displayed sales across 436 Claude listings

A search for "Claude Account" on Goofish, Alibaba's consumer resale marketplace, returns 306 listings: 156 for Claude Pro at a median ¥150 (about $21), 96 for Claude Max 5x and 20x at a median ¥750 (about $105), and 39 for Claude Code at a median ¥148. The platform does not publish sales counts, but its "wants" counters total roughly 11,000.

Warranties are priced in: one seller offers a no-warranty tier that refunds ¥10 if the account is banned, and another takes corporate bank transfers with invoices. One listing at ¥999 is described as a programmer's side hustle that takes no rush orders.

On plati.market, the Russian digital-goods marketplace, a Claude search returns 436 listings from 210 sellers with 254,000 displayed sales, the largest listing at 88,084; one ChatGPT listing shows 115,207. Prices run above Anthropic's: Claude Pro at ₽1,999 (about $24), 20% over list; Max 5x at ₽13,999 (about $169), 69% over; Max 20x at ₽23,999 (about $290), 45% over.

Where the KYC trail leads

Vectoral says a follow-up will look at KYC verification services, which shops such as maihaoguanjia advertise as bypasses; no publication date is given. Lenhard also registered as an IP agent in order to file takedown claims on Goofish and says that process deserves a separate write-up. The article does not identify the UK company or the brokers it approached.