I kept hearing this term coming up. What do people mean by this?
Fooling visitors into thinking they have a problem on their computer, and displaying a phone number to call a tech support center, which will "fix" their computer for a fee.
The affiliate is paid per call generated.
This is a pretty scammy vertical, one of the most scammy actually... luring people into fake support calls on premium lines, then holding them on the line for as long as possible, to ramp up the bill.
The tactic used is to scare the shit out of the users, making them believe they have a virus, their privacy has been exposed, their relatives will find out they used to browse fetish porn sites... etc.
Ugly shit that I'd never touch with a 10 feet pole.
it might look this way - https://prnt.sc/n3nwak , so as guys said - it's made to fool customers so that they think there are some issues that can be fixed only by sharing private info like personal card info, email accounts etc...
You send your traffic to a fake Popup alert or a script which freezes / hangs the visitors computer.
Smart guys know how to close the pop-up and close it with Ctrl +alt+del or restart the computer but very few guys get scared by the scareware text written on the screen and call on the customer care number mentioned on the screen.
After they call, it gets routed to a Tech Support call center anywhere across the world mainly India or Philippines and the agent at the call center ends tried to convince the caller that there is a security breach on his/her computer and need to pay a charge to fix it.
Charges vary from 99$ to 999$ or sometimes more.
The customer pays and gets the popup removed and the call centers promises to give them support for next few years if they ever get any error again.