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 “Splogs”) 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:

           24/7 support still like. We have 30 pc 90 worker & we have 300 captcha team. Your any captcha project we done quickly. We have high experience captcha worker

Sir, We have 10 systems with good typing skill workers. We can easily do 25k per day

I have 40 PCs and 55 Persons working in my office for data entry work. As 1 person can do 800 captcha entry per hour. We can deliver you good quantity with quality

Hello Sir, I will kindly introduce myself.. This is shivakumar.. we have a team to type capcthas 24/7 and we can type more than 200k captchas per day

WE ARE PROFESSIONAL CAPCHA ENTRY OPEATORS AND WE CAN DO EVEN 25000 ENTRIES PER DAY AS MY COMPANY IS A 25 SEATER FIRM SPEALISED IN DATA ENTRY <

Our Team is very much interested in your project and we could easily handle more than 50,000 captcha entries per day

We having more then 10 teams,we are operating 24/7 data entry works and delivering 700k/day captchas daily

I have a team of 7 people, willing to do captchas at $2 per 1000 entries. Please consider my bid. We can definitely provide 50K captchas per day

I have 40 PCs and 55 Persons working in my office for data entry work. As 1 person can do 800 captcha entry per hour. We can deliver you good quantity with quality

Unbelievable! It’s estimated than an Indian worker can earn 10 times more doing CAPTCHAs than with a legitmate data processing job. Is it any wonder they are so eager to do it? I doubt any of them could care less about what their work is doing for spammers. Check out ZDNet for exclusive photos of these workers in action and screenshots of ads aimed at recruiting them. CAPTCHA may not be dead, but its in big trouble.