October 13, 2008, 6:58 AM — Is text based CAPTCHA on the way out? The folks in India sure hope not. CAPTCHA cracking has become big business there. These businesses, calling themselves “data processing†services, pay workers to solve CAPTCHAS. These are then sent on to spammers, who are able to sign up for thousands of accounts with services such as GMail, Yahoo! Mail, Craigslist, Facebook and Blogger (to set up spam blogs, AKA “Splogsâ€) and more. Of course these businesses would never admit that the service they are offering is illegal. They claim to be doing it to aide the visually impaired or as a “study†to help improve the CAPTCHA system.
Several of these companies promise a quarter of a million solved CAPTCHA’s a day at the bargain rate of $2 per 1000 solved CAPTCHA’s. Remember, this is India, where such rates are considered quite high. This new business model is so successful that a franchise model has been developed. Here are some ads from these companies, courtesy of ZDNet: Read the rest of this article
