

Get Paid to Type CAPTCHA's - chatmasta

http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.megatypers.com&#x2F;<p>Note: THIS IS NOT MY SITE. I&#x27;m posting this here in the hopes of generating discussion about a pretty important topic.<p>A few sites exist specifically for breaking CAPTCHA&#x27;s. These are known as &quot;CAPTCHA farms&quot; [1][2]. You can find a bunch of them on Google, but a few examples are DeathByCaptcha [3] and ImageDecoders [4]. These two sites charge about $1.35 per 1000 solved CAPTCHA&#x27;s.<p>This is a relatively well known industry, but most of the articles I&#x27;ve seen only talk about the <i>demand</i> side of the market. Nobody has bothered to find the sites paying the suppliers to type the CAPTCHA&#x27;s. So today I did a little bit of research and was able to find one.<p>MegaTypers [5] pays its users to solve CAPTCHA&#x27;s. Signing up is kind of difficult because you need to track down an invitation code, so I took some screenshots and put them in an album for anyone interested, including pricing table, CAPTCHA entry, and statistics board. [6]<p>When typing CAPTCHA&#x27;s, I was limited by the speed they were offered to me (hence the ability to buy &quot;boost packs,&quot; I presume). In 60 seconds, I was able to type 12 CAPTCHA&#x27;s, 11 of them accurately. Assuming I sustained this rate for an hour, I would type roughly 700 CAPTCHA&#x27;s.<p>Assuming average price of $0.65&#x2F;1000 (it varies by hour), I would earn 45 cents. In an 8 hour day, that&#x27;s $3.60.<p>CAPTCHA farms are making a profit of roughly $500 per day.<p>I&#x27;m wondering: What does the (largely libertarian) userbase of HN think of this?<p>Note: I ran into the character limit, so will post more in a comment.<p>[1] http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;04&#x2F;26&#x2F;technology&#x2F;26captcha.html?_r=0<p>[2] http:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;security&#x2F;2008&#x2F;09&#x2F;captchas-flummox-bots-but-may-be-doomed-by-captcha-farmers&#x2F;<p>[3] http:&#x2F;&#x2F;deathbycaptcha.com&#x2F;<p>[4] http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.imagedecoders.com<p>[5] http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.megatypers.com&#x2F;<p>[6] http:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;QevOc<p>[7] http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_minimum_wages_by_country
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chatmasta
So, in summary: CAPTCHA solving companies charge $1.35 per 1000 CAPTCHA's.
They pay less than half of that to the people typing the CAPTCHAs. Some of
these CAPTCHA farms claim to be solving 700,000 CAPTCHA's per day (according
to the NYT article), which equates to roughly $500 per day in profit, or
$15,000 per month, or $180,000 per year.

According to Wikipedia [7], a wage of 45 cents per hour is higher than the
minimum wage in 40 countries where the number is listed, and more than double
the minimum wage in more than 12 countries.

Personally, I'm divided. People are clearly using these services, and many of
them are working from home, not from a sweatshop as many people imagine
(although I'm sure those places exist). That means conditions must be
"somewhat" tolerable. In some countries (like the dozen with a minimum wage
under 20 cents per hour), a wage of $0.45/hr could actually be really good.

Of course, then there's the issue of spam. Personally I see that as ethically
orthogonal to the labor issues here, since it almost exclusively affects
"first world" people, and hardly in any meaningful way. So I'll ignore that
question for now.

