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solving captchas

solving captchas

September 10, 2023


solving captcha programatically is a pain. me and this other dude at work took about two weeks to solve version 2 of google recaptcha which we learned later, was an enterprise versioned captcha. i did not understand what that meant, until i read between the lines of the docs.

this blog is a simple sidenote on how to solve recaptcha (v2) with 2captcha API. you can read the docs, which btw, is amazing.

prequisities

step 1

right click around the captcha area –> inspect element

step 2

find the “data-sitekey” parameter and copy the value. this will be the ‘googlekey’ value.

step 3

send a http GET request to submit a captcha.

import requests  #pip install requests

API_KEY = '1abc234de56fab7c89012d3'
URL = 'http://2captcha.com/in.php'
SITE = 'https://site-with-captcha.com'

response = requests.get(URL, 
    params = {
        'key': API_KEY, 
        'method': 'userrecaptcha', 
        'googlekey': 'key-from-step2',
        'pageurl' : SITE
    })

step 4

if you came this far, you will get the ID of your captcha as plain text, like:

OK|2122988149

if you get an error message, do not proceed to the next step. refer the documentation if you get any errors.

step 5

make a 15-20 seconds timeout and then, submit another GET request:

URL = 'http://2captcha.com/res.php'
response = requests.get(URL,
    params = {
        'key':API_KEY,
        'action': get,
        'id': 2122988149
    })

if captcha is already solved, server will respond with a randomly generated token. if it does not, you can repeat your request in 5 seconds.

step 6

in developer’s console, find the textarea with id=“g-recaptcha-response”, and send the received code.

i used selenium to send the code back like so:

driver.execute_script("""
    document.getElementById(
        "g-recaptcha-response"
        ).innerText='2122988149';
    """)

Then you can submit the captcha response, and recaptcha will be solved.

Note: there is a high possibility these steps won’t work. if you are looking for a direct method, you can find it here

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