Slashdot Mirror
Spammers Learn to Outsource Their Captcha Needs
lukeknipe writes "Guardian Unlimited reporter Charles Arthur speaks with a spammer, discussing the possibility that his colleagues may be paying people in developing countries to fill in captchas. In his report, Arthur discusses Nicholas Negroponte's gift of hand-powered laptops to developing nations and the wide array of troubles that could arise as the world's exploitable poor go online." From the article: "I've no doubt it will radically alter the life of many in the developing world for the better. I also expect that once a few have got into the hands of people aching to make a dollar, with time on their hands and an internet connection provided one way or another, we'll see a significant rise in captcha-solved spam. But, as my spammer contact pointed out, it's nothing personal. You have to understand: it's just business."
The problem with this reasoning is that there is only a small group of people buying the pills, but the spam is received by a much larger group.
This is of course because spreading spam costs too little to be worried about pre-selecting the audience. When advertising on TV or sending info by post, companies usually try to match their audience to the product they are going to sell. I.e. they do not send adverts for luxury products to houses in poor neighborhoods, they try to weed their lists so that bouncing addresses are not kept on it forever, etc.
All this to maximize the return on the cost of sending the adverts.
Spammers don't have to do this, because they make money anyway.
When it would cost 1 cent to send a spam message, it would not be worthwile to send it to 100000 addresses and make 1 sale of a $25 product.
The very point of spam is it is almost zero cost to the spammer. When you pay people to answer to captchas the zero cost factor disappears. I don't think cheap computers and internet will make the problem dangerous
Not everyone in the third world is going to get computers
Every computer is not going to get internet connected
Not everyone on the internet is going to be spamming
Also consider the fact how much can a single person spam. If the dude with the new cheap computer answers captchas for even 15 hours a day they would hardly generate over a 1000 spam messages which is likely to get the spammer one or two hits. Do you think the spammer is stupid enough to pay for this much profit?