Meh, there's always going to be a longtail of targeted abuse so it's not much to boast over. Xrumer software in 2001 could even let you sit at your computer and

Meh, there's always going to be a longtail of targeted abuse so it's not much to boast over. Xrumer software in 2001 could even let you sit at your computer and fill out those common PHP-lib captchas (like on EZBoard) while Xrumer spammed internet forums and blogs. You could even hire a cubicle farm of humans to manually abuse a web service. Captchas filter out the 90% bulk of automated abuse. Btw, web scraping is on the nearly harmless side of abuse.