Do you know the word for those distorted letters that websites make you type when you sign up for an account? I didn’t until recently. They are called CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart).
Elizabeth told us that some Russian spammers were fooling people into decoding the puzzles for their own purposes. The idea is that the spammers would run porn sites and require viewers to decode a captcha to access the salacious material. The captcha would actually be piped from a website where the spammer was using an automated system to sign up for an e-mail account to send spam from. It’s a clever way to do a jerky thing.