What a captcha is? Usually it’s some letters, digits and special numbers imposed on a picture. Something like a confirmation code that needs to be entered to fulfill one or another action.

Settlement of captcha on a site — is a necessity in a fight with automatic programs, spammers, brut forcers etc. CAPTCHAs are used in almost all online services to protect against automated access.

But such a defence is not always a good thing. Lots of people and businesses need to get information from sites in automatic mode. That’s why captcha services have appeared on the market that allow robots to decrypt captchas. Today we will take a close look on those who use captcha services and for what. This article was prepared along with the captcha-solving service 2Captcha.

1. Services for automated data reception from registries

Information aggregators are pretty convenient services. With their help, you can get a notification of fines, check the counterparty by ITN, get a list of stores selling the needed item, or find discount coupons for a restaurant among hundreds of coupon sites. Some sources provide such information for aggregators in automatic mode but some do not. In such cases the aggregators have to pose themselves as a real users by solving a captcha on these sites. According to 2Captcha’s experts, almost all major domestic banks and other credit organizations are forced to cooperate with captcha-solving services or develop their own similar solutions.

And here 2Captcha service comes in handy. The use of it is quite simple:

• Send the captcha image to the server using your software interface. As a result you will receive a unique ID of your task.
• The task is assigned to one of the free workers. It needs to be said that the task is performed manually. By the way, there is an option to solve one captcha by several workers, so that 100% correct answer can be achieved with this approach.
• Send request for an answer. If it’s ready, the server will return a captcha recognition result.

The employee is given only 20 seconds to recognize captcha. Therefore, even if the service where it is necessary to solve captcha gives you no more than a minute to do so, you still have plenty of time to complete the task. The recognition cost of one captcha starts from less than $0.001. More about 2captcha service here.

2. Buyers on online sales

To buy a ticket for a cultural or sports event, you need to confirm the order by entering captcha. The same applies to limited collections of clothing, equipment and some other goods. This is done so that resellers could not grab out all the best offers in a few seconds after the sales start. For example, resellers used to do so on Aliexpress when Xiaomi was releasing new phones. That time this company was selling only via Aliexpress so resellers was grabbing all items in a few seconds and then selling them at exorbitant prices.

By the way, the captcha implementation did not help, since resellers have hundreds of captcha service’s workers who enter captcha manually, and they still buy tickets in a moments. So, if you want to buy limited items at the Supreme, Nike, Adidas sales or purchase tickets for the best seats on Ticketmaster (actual for the USA, Canada and England), then you have to use special software — “bots”. A few seconds after sale starts they manage to book and put the goods into the cart. Such “bots” could not work without captcha-solving services.

3. SEO specialists and SMM managers

sociohacker, In order to check the effectiveness of the promotion, SEO managers parse search engine results. For performing each request they need to solve a captcha. And there can be dozens or even hundreds of such requests per day. The 2Captcha service with its low cost of captcha recognition will for sure be helpful here — it’s rate is from $0.87 per 1,000 captchas solved. That is, if you are a SEO manager you will spend $3 per month if the workload is high. Even one of the most complex captchas, ReCaptcha V3 costs $2.99 for 1,000 solutions. Note that there is no commission in the service. You can take a look at the statistics of the service on this page.

As for the SMM managers, they also often have to deal with captchas: for example, for delayed posting, cleaning comments, notifying subscribers and so on. If the SMM manager works with several groups, then he has to enter hundreds of captchas per day.

By the way, with the 2Captcha service you can earn. It’s a pocket money — around $0.5 for 1-2 hours, depending on the workload of the service, but this is a good option for the first experience on the Internet. The minimum withdrawal amount is 1 USD. 2Captcha also has an affiliate program. By attracting partners to work with the service you will receive 10% of their earnings or from their expenses. In order to participate in the affiliate program just register in the 2Captcha service.

4. Spammers and bruteforcers

The two most vile types of users who ruin the lives of normal people. There is no need to explain who spammers are. First captcha was invented exactly to fight spammers. But after the search engines ceased to take into account links from spammers, and even began to ban them sometimes, spammers reduced the intensity of their annoying actions. Spammers usually enter captchas manually or use self-written programs. They practically do not use services like 2Captcha, since usually they get only a little more for their work, and it is simply not profitable for them to pay for captcha solving.

There are also brute forcers — scammers who crack accounts by trying to pick a matching username and password. Almost in every service where it is possible to log in, there is a certain restriction on a number of attempts to enter a login and password. Then you need to enter not only a username and password, but also solve a captcha, which becomes more complicated every time. According to 2Captcha’s experts, no more than 0.5% of those people use their service and they immediately get banned when any illegal activity is detected.

5. Blind people

Each day more blind people are starting to use Internet, because now they can control computers using voice commands, and voice assistants like Siri or Alice help them read information. Blind people can even leave comments and communicate comfortably in online chat rooms. Still, since Siri and Alice are not able to recognize captcha such people cannot use a lot of services. The solution is in using 2Captcha. The service even created a bot for Telegram, to which you can send an image of captcha and get it in the text form in return, so then it can be voiced by a voice assistant.