Relay services that provide discounted access to large language model APIs have become a commercial phenomenon, drawing about 3.6 million monthly visits across the ten largest operators, according to a Chinese forum discussion. Operators deploy open‑source gateways such as one‑api or its fork new‑api, which expose a single API compatible with major providers and manage billing, quotas, and user accounts. The market is organized in four layers: upstream merchants sell virtual credit cards and bulk‑registered accounts; midstream pools aggregate these accounts, handle authentication tokens and rate limits, and provide a unified API; downstream relays wrap the pool API in a Chinese‑language interface, process payments, and compete on price; end users include developers, startups, and SaaS firms seeking inexpensive inference or commercial buyers conducting model distillation. Discounts can reach 98 percent, for example a package that supplies $3,333 worth of Anthropic credit for 425 RMB, equating to roughly $0.13 per dollar of official usage, as calculated in a forum post. Fraud tactics observed include mass account creation to claim free credits, chargeback attacks, use of prepaid cards, and proxying traffic through unguarded chatbots. Buyers primarily pursue low‑cost tokens, circumvent geo restrictions, or distill models for commercial use. A daily lottery on hvoy.ai distributes fifty $100 API keys, selecting winners via a cryptographic hash of the latest Bitcoin block and a partial Fisher‑Yates shuffle, with entry credits earned through check‑ins. Providers are advised to raise entry barriers, monitor financial and behavioral signals, cluster accounts for sybil detection, enforce spend caps and concurrency limits, and apply additional verification when risk increases. While these measures can raise the cost of abuse, they do not eliminate it; actors shift tactics as providers strengthen defenses.