United Press International reports that “cybergangs” are hiring people in China, India, Brazil, Russia, Argentina and Nigeria to manually spam site users and spread “cyberscams”:
Popular social sites such as Facebook and MySpace, once immune from mass e-mail spammers because users had to decipher and type in a series of distorted letters to access the system, have been infected by gangs hiring people to decipher thousands of captchas per day, paying a penny per captcha, USA Today said.
Experts say this has allowed gangs to create tens of thousands of fake e-mail and social network accounts, then employing them as starting points for a series of cyberscams spread by e-mail and instant messages, such as the “koobface” virus.
See also past CDT posts on spam.
