If you’ve ever used TikTok, you’ve definitely had at least one encounter with a bot. It’s pretty obvious when you one follows you or likes your videos: low follower count, no videos, lots of numbers in the username.
You may be surprised to hear that programming a bot is a relatively simple task for most developers. However the question remains: How do these bots get past the TikTok captcha at login? You know, the challenges that pop up that ask you to slide the puzzle piece, rotate the images, or click the matching shapes.
The question of the captcha is a constant struggle in automation development, but there are some things that can be done about it. In this article I hope to cover a couple of the methods developers are using to create bots that get past it.
TikTok Captcha Solver API
The primary means by which a bot can get past a captcha challenge is by integrating a specialized API service. An API, or Application Programmable Interface, allows the bot to send the images off to some third party to be solved. That third party then returns the answer to the challenge in the form of coordinates to click on, text to type, or a cookie to add to their browser.
Captcha solver APIs can be powered in one of two ways:
- Humans – In this case, a human worker signs up as a solver and receives the images via some automated process. Their responses are sent back to the API customer.
- Image processing – Image processing solvers use some form of artificial intellegence to analyze the image, solve the captcha, and provide the response. These tend to be faster and more reliable than human captcha solvers.
The most widely used TikTok Captcha Solver is SadCaptcha, which uses image processing to solve any of the three challenges you might encounter at login or registration. Here’s the process bots use to solve a TikTok captcha with this API: – The bot attempts to log in – A captcha challenge pops up – The bot downloads the images and sends them to the API – The API returns the answer to the challenge – The bot uses the answer to unlock the captcha
This might seem like a relatively complex process, but SadCaptcha has a simple Python client that handles that entire process in a single line of code.
Here’s a video of SadCaptcha automatically solving the TikTok rotate challenge (Video source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFF4GdcZAxk):
And here’s a video of it solving the 3D Shapes challenge (Video source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqoZ8hIvLUg):
As you can see, the SadCaptcha API is pretty effective at solving these things.
Stealth automation
Another method of getting past the captcha is to not cause one to appear in the first place. Skilled bot developers can get past the Captcha by simply programming a bot that behaves so much like a human that a captcha never actually pops up.
Stealth automation is an incredibly complex topic, and can be quite the rabbit-hole to get into. Either way, here’s a few key concepts which programmers often implement to make stealthy bots:
- Residential proxies – Residential proxies replace the real IP of the bot with an IP address from an actual residential network.
- Browser modifications – Certain modifications to the web browser are necessary when automating bots. Certain Python plugins such as undetected_chromedriver can be used to accomplish this.
- Natural mouse motion – Websites can detect suspect behavior by analyzing mouse trajectory. A skilled coder will implement natural mouse motions to give the best impression of a real human user. These are just some of the things programmers can do to prevent their bots from encountering a Captcha challenge, but stealth automation is an expansive topic.
Unfortunately it’s also not entirely fool-proof. Even real human users occasionally encounter captchas. If humans themselves sometimes encounter Captchas, then even the finest of bots is bound to encounter one as well.
There has to be some method to get past it automatically. Even if a bot is incredibly stealthy, it still should have a good API service to fall back on so it doesn’t get stuck at login.
Choosing the right tool
At the end of the day, social media bots aren’t magic, and neither is captcha solving. There’s an abundance of solutions on the market to crack any captcha, TikTok included. It’s in the hands of the developer to choose their tools and what works best for their business process. For small-scale operations, a captcha solver may not be necessary, but it becomes more necessary as scale increases.
