Spammers Employ Offshore Help To Bypass Website Form Security Measures

The NY Times (April 25, 2010) published an article that explains how spammers are employing offshore help in India, Bangladesh and China to bypass website form security measures such as CAPTCHAs instead of solely relying on automated robots. CAPTCHA technology is an input device that can connect to a web form and requires a person to type in a string of semiobscured or text-as-image characters to prove that they are human. Freelancer.com reported that the going rate for the spamming work ranges from 80 cents to $1.20 for each 1,000 deciphered boxes. Some of these spamming operations are fairly sophisticated and involve brokers and middlemen.