There used to be hoardes of sites offering free downloads, quizzes, porn etc etc. You would have to solve a captcha to get through, but they were 'stuck' in an infinite loop. I always believed it was being used by spammers/hackers to bypass actual captcha elsewhere on the web. Its kinda genius, offloading the work to randoms looking for free stuff..

[–] hinterlufer@lemmy.world 14 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I also remember services you could pay to get your captcha solved via a browser extension. You could also register as a captcha solver there to earn a few bucks stupidly solving captchas. Although I'm not sure if they were actually legit.

[–] anivia@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 weeks ago

They are legit, I use them for my bots

[–] theterrasque@infosec.pub 6 points 3 weeks ago

I remember back in the day this automated downloader program.. the links had a limit of one download at a time and you had to solve a captcha to start each download.

So the downloader had built in "solve other's captcha" system, where you could build up credit.

So when you had say 20 links to download you spent some minutes solving other's captchas and get some credit, then the program would use that crowdsourcing to solve yours as they popped up.