The point was never to sell access to compromised computers or anything quite as nefarious as that. The point with all of these schemes is to get users to inst

The point was never to sell access to compromised computers or anything quite as nefarious as that. The point with all of these schemes is to get users to install applications on their computer (or phone) that we were getting paid for on a per-install basis. A user who ran through our installer and installed all of the offers might net you $3. Multiply that by thousands a day, hundreds of thousands a month. On the mobile side, as I mentioned in the article, finding desktop users who we could actually make money off of on mobile offers was much harder, which is why I suspect the practice hasn't caught on and become much more widespread in the industry.