Career Opportunities: Blog Spammer Wanted Must Fill in Captchas Work for Pennies

[mandy]

The other day, while administering the Free Our Data blog (freeourdata.org.uk/blog if you haven't stopped by yet), I came across an unusual piece of comment spam - a remark left on one of the blog posts. It was advertising a site offering share tips. No surprise there: "pump and dump" spam, as we've pointed out, has become a principal form of email spam, and spammers seem to have found that people are searching for share advice online (a worrying enough thought on its own)

The surprise was that despite the automated defences to prevent such junk being posted by a machine, it had got through. The junk filter stops hundreds of such attempted spams daily without a murmur; so far it's stopped 10,000 spams while allowing 377 human comments. So why had this got through? The electronic trail explained: the "captcha" (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) had been filled in...

If the captcha was filled in, it must have been done by a person...

full article: http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/...60,00.html