Last time I asked this question [0] on a different story [1], the responses I got were that it definitely is wire fraud, but this is so mind-blowing that I would like to ask again to confirm.
> 3.3 Restrictions.
> Customer will not, and will not allow third parties under its control to: ... (d) create multiple Applications, Accounts, or Projects to simulate or act as a single Application, Account, or Project (respectively) or otherwise access the Services in a manner intended to avoid incurring Fees or exceed usage limits or quotas;
A snippet from the article: A federal court in Washington, DC, has ruled that violating a website's terms of service isn't a crime under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, America's primary anti-hacking law. The lawsuit was initiated by a group of academics and journalists with the support of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Did you think my use of the word services was somehow related to terms thereof, because no. So to quote wikipedia because it was the first that came up when I googled "Theft of services is the legal term for a crime which is committed when a person obtains valuable services — as opposed to goods — by deception, force, threat or other unlawful means, i.e., without lawfully compensating the provider for these services", do you see how someone might argue that changing out the api key could be seen as a form of deception?
I am not saying that I would think it right that someone bring this to criminal court (I figured I better put that out there as even the simplest of comments can be misunderstood, so who knows what several paragraphs together might lead to), I am not saying that they would even win, I am not saying anyone who did it would be doing so for the purest of motives. But I am saying it does seem something like theft of services by using deception.
on edit: the theft and new api keys refers several ancestors back to this anecdote "Their strategy was to have a pool of API keys attached to new accounts that would take advantage of the Google Maps API free tier, and monitor its usage. As the free tier usage would run out, the system would roll over to a new API key automatically."