Dell ran a Christmas themed contest a few years ago (2004-2005?) called the Dellf Sweepstakes. The idea behind it was pretty neat at the time: register your email address, fill out a CAPTCHA box, and you get three chances to win prizes.

The CAPTCHA design made it very easy to reverse engineer (an evenly spaced grid, solid background, unaltered text). By using the photoshop API and a custom written action I was able to take this:

and turn it into this:

From there, I sent the edited image to the Office API and did a quick OCR command to get the text from the image. Then, using the WebBrowser control, I scripted the actions to put the text into the web page and register an email address.

Here’s a view of the program in action:

It’s important to note that I didn’t collect any prizes. This project was more about the thrill of the chase and not so much the actual prizes. I ended up “winning” almost every prize including the grand prize, a 42in. plasma TV.