Captcha Prompt on Android Device

After being the happy owner of a Droid X for the past few months, I was prompted with a CAPTCHA screen this morning.

There seem to be plenty of unanswered posts on the subject. One oddity about my situation is that I could never seem to type the right word, even thought I was quite positive I was typing accurately.

After doing a bit of research on my own, I found a fix that worked for me.

• From a computer (not your phone), go to https://www.google.com/accounts/UnlockCaptcha
• Enter your current password as well as the captcha security phrase
• Once you’ve unlocked your account, go back to the Settings on your phone and go into the Accounts section
• Click on your Google account, make sure everything is checked that you want to sync
• Click the menu button, and choose ‘Sync now’

For someone like me who could not unlock the captcha from the phone, this was a nice workaround.

As for why the captcha prompts occur? I haven’t found any official information from Google, but I would imagine that like most companies maintaining accounts, it was likely because someone tried logging into your account with a bad password one too many times. It’s a way of deterring brute force password hacking.