In fact, I can guarantee they're not solving CAPTCHAs for hire. Our review process for new software applications keeps the quality of our tasks high and keeps spam work out.

CAPTCHA-breaking jobs generally rely on sweatshop labor and don't pay the fair wages we do, so they're not even capable of hiring our workers.

One of our core motivations as a team and a company is to use crowdsourcing as a force for good: happy workers, better technology, no spam. If you're interested in cracking CAPTCHAs, we'll be happy to refer you to our better known, difficult-to-use competitor.

Handwritten and printed OCR tasks, on the other hand, are fantastic for our system.

That is one of the issues with Mechanical Turk. In fact up to 40% of the tasks hosted at turk are spam tasks. Our goal is to be entirely spam free. We train our workers to report all tasks that ask for email addresses, creation of accounts or tasks that look similar to CAPTCHAs.