Word Verification will not protect you from spammers

When Blogger implemented Word Verification to help minimize comment spam on blogs I jumped of joy! I had seen myself forced to turn on comment moderation a few weeks before due to the sheer volume of spam I was getting... so I rushed to turn Word Verification for Comments on.

What would be my surprise today, when I found a comment posted on one my posts, turned into a true link farm pointing to a ton of subdomains hosted inside of redinca.com (I won't give them the pleasure of getting a link from me, but you can check out the type of site it is -I recommend you do so using Firefox and not IE, since I cann't assure you that you will be safe from SpyWare after you visit their site otherwise).

Now, I'd heard a while back that the new wave of SPAM that we seem to be getting lately is largely image SPAM, which essentially pushes an image to your inbox which most SPAM filtering mechanisms can't deal with... since they can't read. However, some recent corporate firewall providers (such as Barracuda) have started to counteract these new SPAM attacks, by firing back with OCR to read SPAM images and be able to tell them apart from images legitimately destined to users. The only problem with this solution is that it still is not within the reach of the average Joe (i.e. you cannot upgrade your e-mail client Junk Filter -yet- to incorporate OCR capabilities and filter those unwanted stock- or Viagra-related SPAM images).

So, it seems blog spammers are essentially using some form of this same technology (or maybe just outsourcing spamming -it could be), enabling them to get past verification words that are there to protect blogs from turning into link farms out of the blue.

Has anyone had a similar experience? What have you done to deal with this?