This is part technical question and part philosophical pondering - I hope I post it in the right forum.
At our site http://www.dinprint.se we get about 20 - 30 new “members” every day. However, almost 100% of these are fake/spam.
Almost all follow the same pattern. One capital letter followed by a surname, like so: DRichards, MKrull, FNorr, FIkusteko etc.
The email addresses used are always formatted correctly, but in a very user unfriendly way, for example MKrull4_knullpuss992@yahoo.com etc
I tried to email some of these accounts as a test, from a junk account of my own and it just bounced, so there seems to be no one behind the account at all.
In order to battle these spam members, I added the EE captcha to the member signup form, but it does not seem to help. The captcha works just fine, but the spam members keep coming anyway. Any idea why? Is the captcha too simple? Too easy for machines to “crack”?