The credit card and the money is what was stolen.

Are we reading the same article? That's mentioned once, as a potential alternative, nested in a bulleted list of alternatives. This is not an article about credit card fraud.

This is about people circumventing the model company's attempts to protect their intellectual "property" (which, if you insist on that incoherent usage of the word "property", they themselves stole from the rest of us).

It's equivalent to buying a DVD in the US which is region-locked to Asia. Grey market, not black market. If you use a stolen credit card to buy that DVD, well tat's a totally separate matter.