Popular websites attract bots. I have the same problem here at Ferodynamics. My solution is to moderate all comments w/ links, on top of my spam filter. Still, spammers are very creative. They get even more creative when there’s more money at stake.
Spamming Myspace is profitable enough to support a captcha-solving industry in India. Looks like you can get 1000 captchas solved for $2-$4. Where is the bulk of the demand coming from? I’m not sure, maybe you can enlighten me.
From what I’m reading, sounds like many captchas are solved to create bogus email accounts, for whatever purpose. To register with at Myspace? I’m not sure, but it sounds like there’s a market for captcha-registered email accounts. How much are these email accounts worth? How do spammers automate checking email to these bogus accounts, for example, to verify a new account somewhere? I’m guessing there are tools to do this too.
I’m also guessing the bulk of the demand/money comes from people wanting to automate friend requests, and leave comments. Captchas are frustrating ordinary people more and more. They take time to solve and they’re hard to read. And navigating Myspace is no picnic in the first place.
Let’s say you’re an artist and you have 100 friends. And you finish a new painting and want to post it as a comment to all 100 friends. If you’re not using a tool/bot, this will take you several hours, to navigate through all the friend pages, find the comment links, paste, confirm, and solve all the captchas. It shouldn’t take that long to broadcast comments!
Now if there’s a tool to post 100 comments for $5, that’s a good value if an hour of your time is worth more than a dollar or two. The question is, what tools are available, and do they work?