Comment by jonfromsf
1 day ago
These aren't stolen credit cards. This hack works by maxing out subscription limits of the Anthropic/OpenAI plans, so you never pay additional API fees. It's fraud but not theft.
1 day ago
These aren't stolen credit cards. This hack works by maxing out subscription limits of the Anthropic/OpenAI plans, so you never pay additional API fees. It's fraud but not theft.
The article mentions that stolen credit cards are being used to buy some of the tokens. Also credit card chargebacks (pay for tokens with CC, resell tokens, then do a chargeback.)
It’s pretty clearly theft of services as generally defined in most places. It’s a hack in the same sense that rolling back your electric meter is a hack.
Violation of Terms of Service is civil, not criminal, matter.
If it amounts to fraud, then it's also criminal.
For example, if you take out a loan and you sign terms and conditions which say you agree to pay it back and then later your circumstances change and you can't pay, that's probably just a civil matter. But if, at the time you signed the agreement, you had planned to deliberately not pay it back, that's fraud and therefore criminal. The fraud is in the fact that you are making a false representation: you are saying you will pay it back, but you know that to be false. It's a very different thing from believing it to be true, but it then later turns out not to be true.
The same principle applies to LLM subscriptions (or any other contract).