A DevOps AI startup was forced to ban all users from Indonesia after widespread abuse of its free inference trial using stolen credit cards. The company offered 15 minutes of free AI inference in exchange for a credit card sign-up, but the fungible nature of tokens made the system vulnerable to large-scale fraud. The incident highlights a growing challenge in the AI industry: offering free or subsidized compute resources attracts immediate exploitation. As noted by crypto commentator Kain, "inference begets inference," meaning any crack in pricing models invites swarms of bad actors seeking to extract and resell value. The episode underscores the difficulty of balancing accessibility with security in an era where AI compute tokens are highly liquid and easily monetized across borders.