India's growing Captcha-Solving Industry » YugaTech

India’s growing Captcha-Solving Industry

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*

Read more about the story at ZDNet.

Abe Olandres

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.

https://www.yugatech.com

22 Comments

Kinnison says:

17 years ago

That’s kinda repetitive and boring but oh well, the things people would do for money.
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Patrick says:

17 years ago

I just can’t believe a job like this existed. Breaking CAPTCHAs? I still don’t understand what they really do and what is it for?
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Andre Marcelo-Tanner says:

17 years ago

for spam purposes or for OCR?
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orgl says:

17 years ago

I’ve recently tried working with captcha entry job with $0.80 per 1000 captcha, my feedback? it’s the most bullshit job i’ve ever tried.
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L.A says:

17 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?
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BrianB says:

17 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.
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USTelecomGuy says:

17 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.
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monty says:

17 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.
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Bhe says:

17 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.
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marhgil says:

17 years ago

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