Deliberate Failed CAPTCHA to Induce Opt-in
Some sneaky programmer has come up with a dirty trick to get visitors to sign up for newsletters or otherwise opt in to email marking. The idea is simple, but its an unethical practice and I am seeing more and more of it daily.
It works like this… visitor completes legitimate registration form. Like many these days the last field is a CAPTCHA code where the visitor has to read the distorted characters and enter them into the field in order to submit the form. Now, many people are wise and un-check those check boxes that ask if you want to receive this company’s spam… eh hmm.. “special deals and offers”… or whatever.
So, visitor un-checks all the opt-in boxes so they don’t get on any spam list. But when they submit the form, they get the CAPTCHA code wrong! And have to do it again. On the second try, the visitor gets so focused on getting the code right they don’t even notice that the newsletter and ‘receive marketing emails’ boxes are checked again on the page reload. They enter the code a second time and bam…Gotcha! The visitor as been tricked by a deliberately failed CAPTCHA trick to induce them into opt-in marketing.
“pre-tty snea-ky sis’
Maybe I was just paranoid, but I started to notice this happening a lot. Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention and got the code wrong more often than I should. So, I looked into it and I am convinced it is a deliberate trick. I find it to be ridiculous and unethical. I am going to continue to test the theory to see who is definitely doing it and begin to list the evil websites I find that are tricking people this way..
This is real slime ball stuff and should not be tolerated. That’s what I think anyway.
