China's Gray Market for Bulk Account Creation and Physical Transfer of Claude Accounts
Chinese developers are obtaining access to models like Claude at a discount of about 10% off the official price through bulk registration and overseas transfer stations. Job postings explicitly require the maintenance of thousands of accounts and the deployment of physical transfer nodes.
Recruitment information shows that companies in Shenzhen, Wenzhou, Nanjing, and other locations are openly hiring Claude account maintenance engineers, account pool maintenance engineers, and subscription engineers, with monthly salaries ranging from 8,000-10,000 yuan to 50,000-80,000 yuan. Responsibilities include account operation and maintenance, sub2api platform operations, maintenance of a thousand-level Claude Max account pool, and Claude technical architecture design.
According to reports from English media, about six tenants operate transfer stations in an office building in Haidian, Beijing, with an estimated tens of thousands of such institutions nationwide; operators register accounts in bulk, split $200 Max subscriptions, utilize free quotas and corporate discounts, and then forward requests through overseas servers, collecting payments in RMB via WeChat or Alipay, with some prices as low as 10%-30% of the official price.
Upstream of the transfer stations are account farms, overseas SMS platforms, payment channels, and KYC services; some operators use anti-detection browsers, TLS fingerprint masking, and SIM banking for bulk registration, and travel to places like Singapore and Tokyo to deploy Mac minis as physical transfer nodes to obtain local native IPs, reduce latency, and adapt to regions supported by Anthropic.
The positions also involve reverse engineering, packet capturing, and decryption of inference processes, as well as API integration, load balancing, rate limiting, and key management for OpenAI, Gemini, Claude, GPT-4o, etc.; some transfer stations record user prompts and outputs for data resale or model distillation, with CISPA audits revealing model replacement at some proxy endpoints.
U.S. companies (Anthropic, OpenAI) restrict access from China and strengthen geographic and KYC checks, with funds flowing from domestic users to overseas accounts and proxy layers, benefiting transfer station operators and account farms, while official revenues are harmed, and Chinese laboratories gain capabilities through distillation, with traffic to transfer locations like Singapore artificially amplified.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
In February 2026, Anthropic disclosed that a single proxy network controlled over 20,000 fraudulent accounts for distillation attacks, involving DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax; similar paths appeared in the early ChatGPT sharing and VPN markets, with account farms migrating from cryptocurrency bulk registration experience and obtaining identities through African/Latin American KYC intermediaries and the Worldcoin biometric black market.
Capital flows from domestic RMB payments to overseas account purchases, Mac mini rentals, and physical nodes in Singapore/Tokyo, with operators recouping costs through subscription splitting, free quota arbitrage, and secondary sales of user data; some funds enter shell companies to sign AWS or corporate agreements, forming a closed-loop delivery from account farms to transfer stations to distillation laboratories.
This is highly similar to the gray paths of early cryptocurrency exchange transfers and cloud services bypassing export controls, and closely resembles the EU's long-term dependency structure on U.S. clouds; currently, China is in a phase of large-scale penetration at the application layer, with official models restricted, and transfer stations filling the access gap while providing low-cost distillation data for domestic laboratories.
Essentially, this represents a reconstruction of the industrial chain and a transfer of pricing power: geographic restrictions push Chinese users into an intermediate layer, with transfer stations intercepting some value and controlling data flow, while official model providers lose direct pricing and usage data, and domestic laboratories accelerate their catch-up through distillation; physical nodes and account pools become new bottleneck assets, rather than mere technical capabilities.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
Restrictions create an intermediate layer, which intercepts pricing power
Cheap access equals selling data
Account pools are infrastructure, physical nodes are sovereign substitutes