During the beta, the only consistent HITs were to identify an album based on a picture and 4 or 5 choices (if Im remembering correctly). These paid pretty well since the workforce volume was very low and the service was brand new. Well, I noticed that the image link contained an ASIN. So, I wrote a greasemonkey script that would look it up on Amazon and highlight the most likely correct answer. I then turned around and shared it with the forum I frequented. It became extremely popular and spread to other forums before we moved it to a private forum. The damage was already done though.

People kept asking me to automate it, but I felt it was against the spirit of mTurk. So, another member would take my updates and add an auto-clicker. That lasted for a couple of weeks at most before the HIT volume dried up and very few would be released. I guess Amazon caught on to what was happening. But before that, several forum members made enough to get some high dollar items: laptops, speakers, etc. Eventually, I relented and created a wishlist. Thats how I ended up with the box sets for the first run of Futurama seasons.