India’s growing Captcha-Solving Industry

Abe Olandres August 31, 2008 · 1 min read

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Both the Philippines and India are fiercely battling the top spot in the global call center and BPO industry. However, it seems India is moving ahead with more innovative and highly in-demand outsourcing needs. ZDNet looks into India’s CAPTCHA solving economy and share some insights on the industry.

Yes, people coming in to work in a 24/7 service company just to type in CATPCHAs. And to those who are unfamiliar with CAPTCHA’s — they are those images with twisted alpha-numeric characters you need to figure out to complete a registration or open an account on sites like MySpace, GMail, Yahoo! Mail, YouTube, Facebook and even ordinary forums, message boards, blogs and comment systems.

In the world of Business Process Outsourcing, the one that can deliver the fastest, most efficient and cheapest service gets the deal.

In India, they have small to medium businesses that service international clients with their CAPTCHA-solving needs. Each worker/employee can solve up to 800 CAPTCHAs per hour. Clients pay between $1 to $4 per 1,000 successful CAPTCHAs solve.

So, when are we going to have something like this in the Philippines? *heh*

Abe Olandres

Editor-in-chief

Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines. He is also a technology consultant, a tech columnist with several national publications, resource speaker and mentor/advisor to several start-up companies.

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43 Comments

neo · 15 years ago

many scams of this OCR jobs exist on odesk. i was victimized. some indians would act like an “employer”, but the fact is they send you their own account so the unsuspecting “contractors” will do the job for them.

adad · 15 years ago

stupid indians..bastards

MItesh patel · 16 years ago

i am very much interested for this work.
$4 per 1000 captcha entry
plz mail me

mi****@yahoo.in

Ketan · 17 years ago

We are a Service provider company having BPO infrastructure, we provide back office solutions to our various clients. we do work for captcha data entry.

We are interested in working with you. If you are interested please mail ke****@yahoo.in, and also the payouts.

we aim at customer’s satisfaction and try to deliver our best services keeping intact performance quality even in a very competitive market.

HASHIM SHAH · 17 years ago

HI SIR HOW R U I HOPE SIR U R GOOD FINE SIR I WANT TO SAY ABOUT ME SIR I AM A PROFESSIONAL TYPIST AND ALSO A MEMBER OF CAPTCHA DATA ENTRY SIR THIS TIME I WORK ON CAPTCHA DATA ENTRY SIR I WANT TO CREAT MY OWN TEAM TO DO WORK ON THIS PROJECT SIR IF U GIVE ME A CHANCE TO DO WORK WITH U SO I AM VERY THANKFUL TO AND GIVE U A GREAT OUT FROM ME.I AM VERY THANKFUL TO IF U GIVE ME REPLY. SIR I AM WAITING FOR UR REPLY.

issai · 18 years ago

people make money out of spamming or out of fraud. breaking captchas is an engineering feat. i don’t think the point is breaking captchas.

why is it when there’s an engineering or software problem to be solved, why does it go to india? india has it’s own little silicon valley. there’s a lot of start ups in the silicon valley that are founded by indians. they’re way on top of their game. they’re willing to work better for less pay, and they reap the rewards.

where does this put pinoys in terms of IT and engineering? papahuli pa ba pinoy? i don’t think so, it’s just that we don’t put resources into technology. we do put resources into labor and health care for export. is it bad? are we losing an edge in the tech industry? maybe. but is it that important? maybe.

i have worked with people from india, bangladesh, ukraine, russia and they’re hardcore engineers. they wrote softwre books. saan na ang mga pinoy? baka nasa google. hehe.

calvin · 18 years ago

who would want to have a job like that. $4 per 1000 solved? is there really money to be made with that? overhead and salary expense? let the indians have it.

monty · 18 years ago

@WEBMASTER

Here’s something to help you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha

WEBMASTER · 18 years ago

Honestly I dont get it…. :( What is it for anyway? does it have to do with internet marketing?

http://www.corel-lifestyle.blogspot.com/

lito · 18 years ago

It’s similar to hacking isn’t it?

home business · 18 years ago

Solving captcha is like helping people break in on a locked vault.

marhgil · 18 years ago

so, that’s the reason I’m getting spam comments on my blog despite having a CAPTCHA?!

Bhe · 18 years ago

I guess until this day it is still very difficult to design a computer system that automatically solves captcha. Image processing do require lots and lots of CPU power just to solve Captcha.

monty · 18 years ago

Forgive me if I assumed inccorectly, but isn’t solving CAPTCHAs basically for circumventing the anti-spamming measures of websites? That’s why websites have CAPTCHAs — it prevents automated submissions of possible bots that mine and spam e-mail addresses.

I, for one, can’t be excited if we drum up that kind of business here. We’d be associating our country with the ugly practice of spamming.

But I still could be wrong in my assumptions that that’s what the CAPTCHAs is for.

Read the talkback in the ZDNet article. There’s a discussion there about that.

USTelecomGuy · 18 years ago

Let the Indian BPO “industry” take 100% market share of this line of business, and let the Philippine BPO sector prosper by continuing to do legitimate and professional work. ‘CAPTCHA farming’ exists only to mine e-mail, IM, and other user data for illegitimate purposes. The Philippines should not get dragged into this type of business — a business that only feeds crime on the web.

BrianB · 18 years ago

This work can ruin your brain. But aren’t there a lot of out-of-work people who can type or spell here in the PI? Guess not.

L.A · 18 years ago

Errr so they break CAPTCHAs to make spam accounts on MySpace, GMail, Yahoo! Mail, YouTube, Facebook and even ordinary forums, message boards, blogs and comment systems?