In New Delhi: To tackle stricter Internet security measures, spammers are outsourcing Security Tests known as captchas. These simple tests ask web users to type in a string of semi-obscured characters to prove they are human beings and not spam-generating robots.
As per online exchanges like Freelancer.com, these spammers pay from 80 cents to $1.20 for each 1,000 deciphered boxes. Such sites bid dozens of such projects every week to people in India, Bangladesh, China and other developing countries.
As per Luis von Ahn, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon who was a pioneer in devising captchas, thousands of people in developing countries are working for these spammers for a pay. He also added that some operations are fairly sophisticated and involve brokers and middlemen too.
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