An affiliate program is a partnership in which outside operators promote a service, product, or destination and receive a share of revenue or another reward for the traffic, leads, or sales they generate. In legitimate marketing, affiliates typically use tracked links or referral codes to measure their contribution.
In cybercrime, the same incentive model can help scale scams: affiliates may direct visitors to fraudulent pages or feed traffic into a routing system that chooses where users are sent. This can spread responsibility across multiple operators and make the wider operation harder to investigate. Defenders can look beyond the visible scam page by examining referral patterns, redirect chains, and shared infrastructure; an affiliate relationship alone, however, does not prove that a participant is malicious.