Solve CAPTCHAs for (no) Fun and (no) Profit
E-mail spammers make their money by leveraging the scale of the Internet: by sending out as many spam e-mails as possible, via as many e-mail accounts as possible. Eventually enough unsuspecting people will respond to the spam to make the whole endeavor profitable.
Owners of free e-mail account services really do not want spammers to acquire accounts for the purpose of sending spam. So service owners use captchas to help ward off automated account registrations. Of course we believe our captcha works better than all the others out there, but still there are some spammers who continue to acquire e-mail addresses despite security tactics. How do they do so?
The answer, for some, is decidedly low tech.
Today’s NY Times has an article describing how some nefarious spammers simply hire others to answer captchas on their behalf. In other words, outsourcing!
I certainly can’t imagine a more tedious job: most captchas are difficult to read, and typically not that interesting (although there are some humorous exceptions). Indeed, one company who used to offer such outsourced captcha-solving services no longer does so as it is neither all that profitable nor interesting:
“We found that it’s not worth doing,” said Mr. Paveri, a manager in SBL’s business process outsourcing and graphics unit. Moreover, he added, “after some time, the productivity of people comes down because it’s a monotonous job. They lose their interest.” (source: NY Times).
So should you worry about it? Perhaps, but your volume of new accounts should be on the order of MSN’s (thousands per day) to make it worth spammers’ time.