You’ve surely seen those annoying “Captchas” before. Any time you try to sign up for a new service, you’ll run into them – squiggly, oddly shaped letters set against difficult to interpret backgrounds. The claim is that computers can’t interpret the letters and, thus only a human can unlock a Captcha (and let me tell you, half the time even a human can’t do it – I hate those things). As such, Captchas are used to defend against activities like spamming and phishing – things that are best done through large scale automation to net the numbers needed to make them profitable.
Captchas are ubiquitous
As it turns out, however, automation doesn’t necessarily mean computers.
Antigate is a company that specializes in breaking Captchas the only way that they can be broken – using human specialists. The company employs teams of dedicated humans to respond to requests for Captcha solutions in real time – essentially a virtual sweatshop, though I’m sure they wouldn’t phrase it exactly that way. They’ll even teach you how to write a program that will enable you to automatically send the requests to them, essentially automating the process even though part of the mechanism is most assuredly fully biological.
The company is just one of several offering such services, and competition must be fierce, because the price point offered is ludicrous. For a dollar – that’s one, single dollar – you’re looking at up to a thousand Captchas solved. It is difficult to believe that these automation factories are paying their workers any kind of decent wages if they are able to offer prices like that, and given that the services are offered in both English and Russian, it’s not that hard to imagine where the “factories” are physically located.
That said, it’s clear that there’s a market for such services, and so long as there is demand, there will be supply. Where there’s email, there’s spam, and so where there are Captchas… there will be Antigate.
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