@MisterF is more connected than you or I can imagine.
When he says it's not a 'nickel and dime' operation - he means there's a group that's pushing this at scale. Everything that can be thought of, and everything that is beyond your thought paradigm is being done.
There are companies making their Text models public - now do you think there are no individual teams leveraging this and running their own setup?
All this requires a lot of fire power. And yes, there are people doing it. And banking equally hard.