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CAPTCHA Busted? Company Claims To Have Broken Protection System
sciencehabit writes "A software company called Vicarious claims to have created a computer algorithm that can solve CAPTCHA with greater than 90% accuracy. If true, the advance would represent a major breakthrough in artificial intelligence. It would also mean that the internet will have to start looking for a new security system. The problem, however, is that Vicarious has provided little evidence for its claims, though some well-known scientists are behind the work."
They probably are worried about bad guys using the payment system in an attempt to verify stolen credit cards by making seemingly-routine purchases that would not seem out of the ordinary and thus would not trip anti-fraud measures.
A small company I used to work for was abused by credit card thieves in this way, and dealing with the fraudulent charges and the resulting chargeback fees was the top non-salary cost for a few months (exceeding even the colocation costs). The problem existed because they allowed users to create either a free or paid account for the service and, if they selected the paid account, they could enter the card information on the sign-up page. Later, they changed it so users would need to create a free account (which required a captcha) and then upgrade it to a paid account in the account settings. Fraudulent charges dropped to essentially nil after that.
If the phone company requires only the invoice number and credit card data to pay a bill (rather than having you create an account, log in, and then pay the bill) then it's likely they're dealing with a similar problem.