For the past year I have been noticing a new kind of spam in my site's comments. I should say spam attempts as my site uses a moderation queue (and not CAPCHA) for all submitted comments and other non-registered user new content.

The first time I came across this I almost posted the comment as it made a lot of sense and it was actually well-written - however, when I clicked on the user's website link I came across an ad for anatomic bed mattresses. Gee, I thought, could it be that they now pay humans to be intelligent spam robots? Human spam robots that can defeat CAPTCHAs as well as non-thorough moderators?

A year later, I know that this is indeed the case and has in fact become very common with farms of human spam machines growing in cheap labor countries like India. I wonder what their job title is...

Link1: http://www.geek.com/articles/news/cheap-labor-helps-spammers-beat-captcha-tests-20080410/

Link2: http://montenasoft.com/en/blogs/that-annoying-human-spammers-simple-solution-spam