Behind most "Captcha Solvers": A Slave

On the backend of many captcha-solving APIs, resides not a program, but a worker, and sometimes, a slave. Low-wage workers in underdeveloped countries are often exploited by companies looking to outsource their labor in order to cut costs and increase profits. Such workers are paid below a living wage: In fact, research done by F5 Labs suggests that solvers earn only 2 USD for an 11-hour workday! This in itself could be already considered a true “slave wage”, however, there is enough evidence to suggest that there may be a link between the captcha-solving industry and the rings that deal in “cyber-slavery”.

Cambodia, for example, is notorious for forced labor in virtual sweatshops, which are essentially gigantic call-centre-like buildings, where slaves are forced to work long hours and face abuse such as beatings and humiliation. Such labor involves falsifying forms, running phone scams, and participating in “crowdsourcing” services, which are essentially online platforms used for mass task-completion, where workers earn an average of 10 cents per task. One service, Amazon Mechanical Turk, even provides a public API that makes exploiting workers in some forgotten corner of the world as easy as writing a form in XML and putting it into a Python script.

While CAPTCHA resolution is technically against the Amazon Terms of Service, some crafty individuals have managed to pass through the restrictions by creating tasks that are technically something else, such as making workers get to a page on the taskmaker’s own website, with an “unrelated” CAPTCHA then being put in the way of the page, which workers must solve to complete the main task.

Communists must immediately begin studying ways to sabotage the slave rings around the system and mount efforts around such platforms. We give particular priority to the slave rings. A particular method that could be used is creating fake tasks that allow victims to send over a plea for help. An effective form of sabotage on the part of the workers could also involve deliberately inserting misleading or wrong information into forms: as long as most of the active workforce is actively working against the platform, Amazon won’t dare to issue mass bans and have a labor shortage - instead, they may raise the pay cap on services.