Spammers are hiring firms to defeat CAPTCHA's

You send the firm the CAPTCHA's and a real person solves it and send it back to the customer. Apparently the employee solving the puzzle only gets paid if the puzzle is:

Solved correctly
Solved within 60 seconds (even though the rule is under 20 seconds)

The firm charges $1 for every 1,000 CAPTCHA's that you send. They also sell Gmail and Yahoo mail accounts in bulk

clipped from voices.washingtonpost.com Web Fraud 2.0: Thwarting Anti-Spam Defenses Spammers have made great strides this past year in defeating CAPTCHAs, the distorted text used as a security test to ensure a person and not a machine is behind a computer screen. But automated programs that spammers use to thwart CAPTCHAs still aren't nearly as successful as the practice of hiring thousands of people to do nothing but remotely solve the puzzles for clients.