There could be a reason when it comes to card fraud. Card fraudsters need a way to check cards before they use/resell them, so they find a cheap e-commerce and automate the checkout on a low-value item and run the card numbers through there.

Of course, this is a problem manufactured by the card payments industry (we've had the cryptography to make card fraud nonexistent for decades) and it slowly getting fixed by 3D-Secure (also called Strong Customer Authentication) and as usual the US are behind.

> Why do some stores have a captcha as part of their checkout process? I'm noticing that recently and I can't figure it out.

And why doesn't Google optimize it to return "human" straight away when I am logged in with a 15 year old paying account who took a similar test earlier that day same day?

Anyone who knows who are free to answer?

Because otherwise I'll stick with my explanation which is one or more of:

- organizational incompetence (surely someone should be able to code that up, only they don't call the shots and those who do aren't competent to see the issue)

- greed (why do it when we can force people to do unpaid work for us?)

- other possibly even worse reason

Shop owner decides the 'strength' of verification