It was a line on Poker Face (the excellent US detective drama currently streaming on Now TV) that piqued my interest. Hunched over a laptop, Natasha Lyonne’s heroine, Charlie Cale, claimed to be working as a ‘Captcha technician’ – someone who solves those fiddly, occasionally infuriating internet puzzles for money. You know – the ones that ask you to ‘Select all the squares with traffic lights’, ‘Select all the squares with bridges’ or simply tick a box to say you’re human before you can log into a website.

Given the series has satirised everything from New York City rent controls to multi-level marketing schemes, I originally assumed it must be a joke. But not for the first time the writers had wrong-footed me: it’s actually perfectly possible to earn money (around $1 per 1,000) by solving batches of Captchas from the comfort of your own home.

Who pays for these services in the first place? Like many things involving the underlying plumbing of the internet, the answer isn’t particularly pleasant. It turns out that the legions of hackers, bot networks and web-scrapers who make money from our data, sometimes with malicious intent, are often willing to pay remote workers in order to help them force entry to websites.

So there you have it. But just one more thing, as Cale’s predecessor Columbo used to say: why are Captchas still such a big........

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