Bogus / Fake Signups / User Registrations
Hello, everyone —
So I set up my website and started to get a volley of signups. They are bogus. I'd go into details as to how they're bogus, but I'd prefer to not let spammers know what's cluing me in.
At any rate, I noticed a specific pattern, and added a user tracker to ask a question that I would expect a human being with mastery of the site's three primary languages (English, Esperanto or Spanish) to be able to answer.
I am still getting bogus signups, but this user tracker helps me sort the wheat from the chaff, as it were. I am using the CAPTCHA feature, but these signups are getting past it. It initially occurred to me that perhaps spammers were hiring large numbers of proto-hackers (I am imagining an army of aspiring 6- and 7-year olds who are hoping to break into the hacking biz) to go around finding sites and sign up bogus accounts in the hopes of having a place for their spammer employers to store their Viagra ads.
But there is a pattern in the way these signups are filling in my user tracker field that makes me think that there is a bot involved. So I am curious: can someone confirm for me that, in fact, the bots have a way to automatically do CAPTCHA character recognition?
I'm asking out of raw curiosity. The user tracker has solved the problem for me, although I still have to go in and manually delete all of the signups, which is tedious.
- Kat