I used to spam porno as a young teen in the late 90s.. I remember when activex came out, you could embed an .exe or batch script into a page and have it automatically prompt for download. Due to the fact that most people had little experience with computers back then, they basically clicked "yes" on everything..

It was the dial-up days, and there were a lot of shady "dialer" programs that would automatically connect to a 900 number that would connect to some porno server in thailand and bill your phone number 19.99/per minute connected. We'd market them as "live sorority cams", and stuff like that, but all it ever was was some gifs, never actual live video feed, which would've been difficult on a 28.8 connection that averaged 3kb/s downloads.. we'd set up a fake website with some free hosting company, embed a batch file in the html and have it download to the users desktop with a name like "Live Cam Portal" or some such nonsense, which would automatically execute our dialer which would dial into the 900 number.

Of course you couldn't do this on your mom's aol account or you'd get termed for life, so you had to steal accounts by cracking or phishing. Everyone's password was abc123, drowssap, nsync or iloveu back in those days, and there were always some random login portal to some AOL service that wasn't rate limited, so you'd fire up visual basic and put together a cracker, then harvest names by creating a bot that would enter random lobby chats, harvest the names of all occupants, save them to a txt file, exit the room, and start again. You'd run a dupe-kill on the list at the end of the night and you'd have several thousand names to crack. You'd load a password list of the most common 10 or passwords and you'd probably net about 10 accounts out of every 250 usernames tried.

Anyway, I made a shitload of money for a couple years. My parents thought I was selling drugs. Good times, though I feel bad about it as an adult.