mechanical turk

I was talking with somebody about captcha arms race at work today and heard the most brilliant scam. Apparently spammers who are attempting to spam to captcha-enabled sites screen-grab the captcha image and then turn around and serve the same image as a captcha to fake/spammy porn sites they run.

So the real people trying to get in to the porn site do the captcha computation for the spammers, who then automatically feed the results back in to the original site. They are tapping into the inexhaustible queue of pending porn-hounds to get through legitimate site defenses.

For some reason, the beauty of this completely made my week.

EDIT: Prior art found here