Stupid Strategy - entering data for illicit purposes

Summary: poorly paid and of dubious legality.



You may have seen ads on line for "data entry" jobs which say they'll pay you well. No experience needed etc. Some of these are actually asking you to participate in a process designed to hack into other websites. The idea is that you, a human being, can read the deliberately distorted picture codes used to keep online shoppers data secure. Imagine you are trying to set up a blog here. You get to a certain point, and you are asked to type in a code which is represented as a picture- it may be the words chocolate frog but they are twisted, and clearly a graphic rather than normal typing. This is done because a computer unlike a human being, cannot "read" this picture as text. Those who wish to get into secure or confidential areas of sites without permission want human beings to interpret these codes and send the data back to them. Then they can use a comptuer program to raid information from many of these sites very, very quickly.



There are websites dedicated to selling this data to others- I found this out when following the suggestion of a friend about doing the data entry for payment. She had thought it was a low paid but legitimate job, because that is how it is worded. They offer something like $2 per 50-100 "translated" which is a very low rate indeed, especially for helping someone else to behave nefariously. I signed up for one of these websites only to find they were offering to sell me translated codes. After talking to the highly computer literate beloved pet husband, I soon realised this was NOT something I wanted to be part of. He did point out that for sight impaired users of the 'Net, there are always voice recording versions attached to the legitimate websites secure areas, so these users can enter the code and go about their business. In other words, they hear and then type the code word. So there really is no legitimate reason I can see for doing this kind of "data entry".