I am a legit user and am happy to pay for what I use. I saw that my original account had been compromised as the chat threads were coming up in Mandarin, and I don’t speak Mandarin.
Within 12 hours of seeing the hack, I cancelled the account… or so I thought. Of course I attempted to speak to a human at OpenAI, but they have no means to do so. If I am mistaken on this, please pass me the phone number to call. The “bot” they offer (ironic for an AI company) was useless. I followed all available instructions and believed that my account was deleted. In fact, I have a screen shot confirming the cancellation and yet, since that day, 30 days ago, and today, someone has amassed between $1000 and $1500 in charges.
I know that OpenAI has hard limits on API calls which were clearly overrun. In fact, it is even possible that the hacker has somehow harvested my credit card number from OpenAI and is just creating other accounts with it. According to OpenAI, hard limits can only be raised by explicit permission via e-mail and there was no evidence that I was sent such a mail.
This is a nightmare. My recommedation to others, given OpenAIs shoddy sense of what it means to cancel an account, is to only use credit cards or methods of payment where the bank has your back and will not hesitate to dispute the charge on your behalf (because you will not be able to dispute it yourself without, say, Amex doing it for you).