A lot of the early tasks posted to Mechanical Turk by Amazon to get people using their new platform were easily automated. You could basically choose the "none

A lot of the early tasks posted to Mechanical Turk by Amazon to get people using their new platform were easily automated. You could basically choose the "none of the above" option 100% of the time and end up with a quality score above their threshold. Instead of partying in college, my friends and I wrote a script to complete the tasks. We took over university computer labs to run it on a bunch of different computers. We made a few thousand bucks. Good times.