Is 2Captcha a Scam? | Website Review
2Captcha is a platform which provides CAPTCHA-solving services to businesses.CAPTCHA is an online security measure invented in 1997 designed to prevent automated actions. It can be implemented on websites by installing plugins such as Captcha and ReCaptcha. There are some differences in the features among them and ReCaptcha also uses the data collected from the solved captchas to train machine learning algorithms. This includes things like digitization of books and self-driving cars.
Using the 2Captcha platform, businesses can request the solving of captchas by integrating the 2Captcha API into their software. The captcha requests are then sent to users who have signed up on the platform. 2Captcha is a service which helps companies bypass security measures of websites by outsourcing the solving of captchas to real humans.
As captchas are used for preventing bots from performing undesired activities like automatically posting form and comments, it can be inferred that 2Captcha enables the posting of unwanted spam. Therefore, 2Captcha is associated with unethical or ‘black hat’ techniques for manipulating rankings and ratings.
Website Information
Official Domain
2captcha.com
Registered on
2014-04-22
Owner
Unknown
Only the information about the domain name and registration date is available as other details have been protected by a privacy guard.
Company Information
Email ID
info@2captcha.com (Status: Working. Testing with MailTester)
Phone Number
+7 4955653175 (Status: Working. Tested with TextMagic)
Address
1, Tomarovicha st., Putilkovo, Moscow, Russia (Unverified)
Social Media Profiles
Facebook – Created on June 10, 2014: https://www.facebook.com/2captcha
Twitter – Created in June 2014: https://twitter.com/2captcha
Scamadviser Verification
The Scamadviser page of 2Captcha has not been claimed by the company.
Only the Email ID is provided in the website footer. The phone number and address are present at the end of the Terms & Services page. There are no official social media profiles of 2Captcha listed on the website but some profiles were found on searching the websites directly. The pages are active though the posts are infrequent. Websites which are scams generally don’t maintain active social media profiles.
Earnings Claim
The ‘Statistics for Workers’ section on the home page gives the rates as $0.3 per 1000 normal Captchas and $1 per 1000 ReCaptchas.
The Worker FAQs mention that the rates for normal captchas vary between $0.25 - $0.60 per 1000.
The rate for ReCaptcha is fixed at $1 per 1000, but these can only be solved by downloading the Windows application or Android app.
According to Wikipedia, it takes roughly 10 seconds to solve a captcha. At that rate, it will take almost 2 hours 47 minutes to earn $0.3 solving normal captchas and $1 solving ReCaptchas. This calculation is for a 100% success rate. In reality, success rates for solving captchas are 80% – 100% for normal captchas and 60% – 70% for ReCaptchas. Therefore the actual estimated earnings will be as follows:
| Type of Captcha | Success Rate | Payment Rate (Per 1000) | Earning (Per Hour) |
| Captcha | 80% - 100% | $0.25 - $0.60 | $0.075 - $0.22 |
| ReCaptcha | 60% - 70% | $1 | $0.26 - $0.28 |
When you consider that there is a waiting time in between the captchas, the earnings decrease even more.
Workers can increase their earnings substantially by referring other workers to sign up on the platform using their code. 2Captcha claims to pay 10% of the earnings of every worker who has been referred by you.
Scamadviser Trust Score
Scamadviser’s algorithms have given 2Captcha a low Trust Score of 10%, indicating that users must be cautious while using this website. You can learn more about 2Captcha’s Trust score here.
Scamadviser User Reviews
Even though there seem to be a number of signs which indicate that 2Captcha is not trustworthy, the user reviews are highly positive. 2Captcha has a rating of 4.7/5 based on 168 user reviews across Scamadviser, TrustPilot, SiteJabber and Safe.Shop.
The users assert that it is a legitimate website which gives payouts as claimed, making it a good source of earning a supplementary income. All the reviews are by workers who are solving the captchas and not the customers who are paying for the services. A major reason for this is the benefits provided for referrals. Workers are incentivized to maintain a good image of 2Captcha so that potentials referrals don’t get dissuaded from joining by reading negative reviews.
You can read the user reviews here.
Conclusion
2Captcha has a low likelihood of being a scam.
Even though 2Captcha’s services seem to be unethical, it does not seem that they are scamming the customers or workers. The payouts being given to workers seem quite low when calculated on an hourly basis. The people signing up as workers seem to be from countries such as India and Philippines, while most of the customers are from the United States. Due to the differences in exchange rates, it appears that the payouts are considered as reasonable by the workers and they are satisfied by the compensation being provided for their efforts. 2Captcha charges customers $0.5 to $1 per 1000 captchas and $1 to $2.99 per 1,000 ReCaptchas, which gives them a profit margin between 50% to 66.6%. The compensation is fair, in my opinion.
Neither the company nor the workers are claiming that the work is high-paying. The expectations being set are realistic and working on 2Captcha’s platform is presented as a way to earn some extra income by doing easy work. Below is an excerpt from the website mentioning that 2Captcha can serve as an entry point for people trying to understand the internet economy.
The contact information given on the website seems to be real too. There are a few spelling errors and grammatical errors on 2Captcha’s website which make it look a bit suspicious. However, as we have seen already, they do not seem to be involved in deceitful or fraudulent practices.
2Captcha has a semi-automated system of suspending or banning users who make too many mistakes. This system could be more transparent to give workers a detailed report of the reason for the account being suspended or banned.
Unlike scam websites which offer work-from-home jobs, 2Captcha does not ask users for any kind of payment to sign up with them or at any point after signing up, which clearly sets it apart from fraudulent websites.
Apart from the low rate of earning, the only drawback seems to be that you become an enabler of email spam and fake content (accounts, comments and reviews) all across the internet. The services being provided by 2Captcha might indirectly be supporting online scams. Despite this, an increase in the Trust Score may be warranted as the reviews indicate a positive experience.
Learn More
2Captcha is a rare example of a data entry job not being a scam. The internet is rampant with fake websites which claim to provide payments for easy work-from-home jobs. Learn more about these scams and how you can protect yourself from them by visiting the page about Employment Scams.
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