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Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Artificial Political Opposition bought on Amazon's Mechanical Turk

Artificial Political Opposition
Ive had my research assistant (wife) working on mechanical turk for the past few days after she wanted some easy tasks to make money online... I have heard about the system and how it can be used as a great tool for repetitive tasks or data entry. I looked through a few of the HITs and quickly saw there was abuse... people are asked to "clear cookies" before "testing lead form" or "enter real info to test a cred app form". its obvious that these accounts are cheating other affiliate programs but i saw a very interesting one just now. Here is an excerpt from the instructions
3. Say, "Hi, I am calling to oppose bill S6873. My New York zip code is 10003. Thank you"
They are paying for political opposition to the bill S6873 in New York which has to do with sub-leasing apartments and affects hotel rentals. You can specify different qualifications (like location) and yet the creator choose not to care about who or where they were from...

Heres the copy I made of the job unless it disappears and screenshot of the active job

Im always surprised when i see these kind of blatant attacks on the internet... and im really wonder if it works or if they have already caught on to the strange volume of calls with the exact same script... reminds me allot of money mules who help the hackers get the money out of people's accounts but most dont care because they are getting a cut themselves