>Meanwhile back in the jungle: Al, I agree it's a PITA. I suspect there's human intervention so bots don't use stolen credit cards to buy dozens of licenses that cause infinite angst once onsold...

The Digital River purchase had the most extreme CAPTCHA I've ever had to go through. It was something like a 3x4 grid of images, with an instruction to "click on all images that contain storefronts". The twist, which I didn't notice the first time through was that each time you clicked correctly on a lo-fi/ambiguous image it would be replaced by another image which might or might not include a storefront. You had to keep clicking until there were no more images that included storefronts. Not noticing the switched images I flunked the first time.

The second time was "images containing a street sign". Got that one right, thankfully. So, they could be pretty sure I was a human being.

That doesn't eliminate the possibility of CAPTCHA farmers but couple it with reverse IP lookup to make sure it's not India or China and they could be pretty sure the user is legit. Then it's up to the CC company to authorize or not; dunno if there's any ability to feed the CC company the source IP or other geo data to help with that.

So, in the Digital River case I don't see how human intervention would be of any help.