Resellers move 1,000+ Claude accounts a month

A UK-registered company presenting itself as a software design studio turned out to be a Claude account reseller, emailing around to source more than 1,000 Claude accounts a month, according to threat research published by Vectoral. The write-up, by Matt Lenhard, traces where operators of AI relays get their account supply.

At a glance

• Brokers handle KYC verification and source foreign cards that clear payment checks, then sell finished accounts on to relay operators, foreign model labs sourcing accounts for distillation, and consumers dodging geo restrictions.
• One of the larger Chinese account marketplaces advertises roughly ¥200,000 in daily sales, about $28,000, while Alibaba's Goofish returns 306 listings for Claude accounts with wants counters totalling around 11,000.
• Chinese shops price below Anthropic's list so relays can resell tokens at a margin, while Russian marketplace plati.market charges 69% above list for a month of Claude Max 5x.

The two-sided pricing is the tell. Where accounts trade below list, the buyer is a business converting subscriptions into resold tokens; where they trade above it, the buyer is a person whose card will not clear. That likely puts model labs and inference providers in the position banks have occupied for decades, defending an account that carries spendable value and, unlike a reversible ACH transfer, offers no clawback once credentials change hands.

ChatGPT Plus resells at 89% of list, a twelve-month Google AI Pro at 0.6%

Vectoral's supply table lists nine subscriptions with their resale price as a share of official list. ChatGPT Plus sits at 89% and Claude Pro at 74%, Claude Max 5x at 54% and SuperGrok at 26%, while Claude Max 20x and ChatGPT Pro 5x both come in at 24%, ChatGPT Pro 20x at 15% and Grok Heavy at 13%.

Five sourcing routes are described: standard recharge, where a seller applies a subscription to a buyer's existing account; finished accounts delivered as credentials; account takeovers; promotion and device arbitrage; and ridesharing across several users. In a takeover, an API key or session cookie picked up in a supply chain attack or by an info stealer is resold to a broker or a relay, which Vectoral calls an increasingly common tactic.

AI HOME offers finished Pro 20x accounts at ¥200 to relay operators

AI HOME, a Telegram merchant found through an advertisement on NodeSeek that carried 519 views, markets wholesale accounts directly to relay operators and offers finished Pro 20x accounts at ¥200. Under one advertisement a reader pointed out that neighbouring suppliers were cheaper, despite AI HOME billing itself as the source.

henduohaopifa.com sells 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 recharge-based. maihaoguanjia carries around sixty SKUs spanning Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Cursor, Codex, Copilot, Warp and MidJourney, and advertises KYC verification bypasses.

zhanghao66.com brands itself the lowest-price wholesale AI account shop, carries 37 SKUs and discounts by volume, with Claude Max dropping from ¥770 to ¥725 at thirty units. Its own promotional line claims about ¥200,000 in daily sales and invites capable peers and KOLs to cooperate.

Goofish returns 306 Claude listings, plati.market 436

Goofish, Alibaba's consumer resale marketplace, returns 306 listings for a Claude account search: 156 for Claude Pro at a median ¥150, 96 for Claude Max 5x and 20x at a median ¥750, and 39 for Claude Code at ¥148. The site's wants counters add up to about 11,000.

Warranties are priced in. One seller runs a no-warranty tier that refunds ¥10 if the account gets banned, another offers invoices and corporate bank transfer, and the zhanghao66 operator says he began on Goofish, buying Gemini accounts at ¥30 and selling them at ¥99.

On plati.market, a Russian digital-goods marketplace, a Claude search returns 436 listings from 210 sellers with 254,000 displayed sales, the largest single Claude listing showing 88,084 and one ChatGPT listing 115,207. A month of Claude Pro costs ₽1,999, about 20% over list; Max 20x ₽23,999, about 45% over; Max 5x ₽13,999, about 69% over.

The promised KYC bypass follow-up

Vectoral says a further article will examine KYC verification services, the category maihaoguanjia advertises, and gives no publication date for it. The author also registered as an intellectual property agent in order to file takedown claims on Goofish, and says that process deserves a post of its own; no outcome from those claims is reported.