Spammers Using Sweatshops to Beat CAPTCHAs

J

John_Keck

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 3, 2010
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379
Spammers have started hiring teams of low-wage workers in places like Russia and Southeast Asia to defeat CAPTCHAs. The running rate is about 75-cents per 1,000 CAPTCHAs, but I guess it beats working for Foxconn :p.

"The beauty of most modern CAPTCHAs is that they simply take Latin characters — so they don't actually need to understand what the words mean — they simply need to be able to look at the symbols and type the appropriate ones on their keyboard," he says.
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................incredibly pathetic and desperate times I guess.

Wow.
 
75cents per 1000? wow. I wonder how many the top earners clear per hour.
 
@Druneau:
The faster they are, the better — because the going rate is about 75 cents per 1,000 CAPTCHAs solved. "It's about $2 or $3 a day," Savage says.
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This is old news. I first read about it a month or so after captchas started going mainstream.
 
I wondered why most of the spam I get on my phpBB3 forum is from Russia. I've got the spam bots taken care of, but a human spammer sneaks through every now and then trying to sell Viagra or some dating service.:mad:
 
Well some forums get smart and ask real questions, so if they don't speak/read english they won't be able to answer.
 
Blazestorm said:
Well some forums get smart and ask real questions, so if they don't speak/read english they won't be able to answer.
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Find this to be better and easier than Captchas. Some are very difficult to read and make out. Takes my 5 ties sometimes
 
Shockey said:
Find this to be better and easier than Captchas. Some are very difficult to read and make out. Takes my 5 ties sometimes
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yeah some of them are bullshit.

but $0.75/thousand? That is ridiculous. You would get what... about $5 after FIVE HOURS of 5 seconds/captcha?
 
Koko56 said:
yeah some of them are bullshit.

but $0.75/thousand? That is ridiculous. You would get what... about $5 after FIVE HOURS of 5 seconds/captcha?
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Kinda reminds me of those "get paid to surf" things back in the day, where you got a $20 check after like 6 months of surfing :p My relatives signed up for so many of those things you could barely see their browser anymore.
 
I have seen some captcha defeating software in action and it works pretty well. Some of those captcha images are impossible to read even if you are human. Good captchas ask you a question in a sentence that you answer they don't simply request you parrot some characters.
 
niconx said:
I have seen some captcha defeating software in action and it works pretty well. Some of those captcha images are impossible to read even if you are human. Good captchas ask you a question in a sentence that you answer they don't simply request you parrot some characters.
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Can't remember the name but there's a math oriented forum that give you equations to solve as captcha, pretty nifty.
 
Koko56 said:
yeah some of them are bullshit.

but $0.75/thousand? That is ridiculous. You would get what... about $5 after FIVE HOURS of 5 seconds/captcha?
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I'm sure they do 5 captchas/second. All they need to do is look & type, and if they get it wrong it probably just doesn't count and it continues to the next. Take a look at this, to see how proficient some can become: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fNrIg2pxd8
 
The owners make the money, not the people actually doing the typing.

They normally use homeless people and instead of a paycheck, they are given food and a roof over their head.
 
Weird i was always under impression that properly taught neuron network would read those captchas.
But then again probably paying someone who knows how to do it for few days of work and preparation of learning set would cost as much as few bilions of captchas at the mentioned rate :D
 
I've seen multiple registration attempts from Russia and other odd places around the world on my own message board. I changed the registration to require admin approval to avoid spam problems a long time ago, and I still have a few registration attempts every month. It shows how persistent these scumbags are.
 
Some of those captchas no human can read. Youtube annoys the fuck out of me with their incessant captchas. They are evil and must go.
 
Blazestorm said:
Well some forums get smart and ask real questions, so if they don't speak/read english they won't be able to answer.
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Not really. It just makes one additional step of copy/pasting the question into translate.altavista.com and you can get a rough question trnaslation in Russia or Chinese(simplified), etc.

It'll probably turn into osmething slightly unreadable but understandable like
'Capital city Colorado what is?'
 
That still sucks up time... vs. just entering in letters matching on the keyboard in front of them.

That and it wouldn't be obvious where they have to enter in the form. I've seen some forums be sneaky and throw in questions where you enter a password or username and sometimes it's simple like "what's 2 plus 6 divided by 2" ... or other questions specific to the forum you're registering for.

It's still better than Captcha.
 
dark_reign said:
I wondered why most of the spam I get on my phpBB3 forum is from Russia. I've got the spam bots taken care of, but a human spammer sneaks through every now and then trying to sell Viagra or some dating service.:mad:
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Sorry, my English not so good, your order of 1000 Viagra tablets will arrive soonly!

;)
 
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