[klauserc]

As someone responsible for login/registration at a large online retailer, I see so much bot traffic and attacks. Attackers try to enumerate registered users, try to mass-login with credentials from password dumps, try to register accounts controlled by bots.

Login forms are a war zone. Looking for patterns that indicate the other party is a bot and serve them (and only them) a captcha is a technique that is quite effective. But it is not perfect. Especially business customers often get forced to solve captchas in our system.

If you know of a better solution (other than: don't be a big online shop), I'm all ears.

[immibis]

What is wrong with a bot creating an account? Is their money not as green?

[voytec]

I'd guess that their problem is data pollution (marketing unhappy, ads impressions unaligned, data needs to be cleaned anyway before PowerPoint presentations for shareholders are made). And technically: unnecessary database growth which impacts migration efficiency, backup size and duration and stuff like that.