Can someone explain "dialer"

[Toby]

Dialers usually require download of a sponsor specific application that the user must installed that in turn dials in via the phone at a per minute rate to access the desired content.

Europeans are much more accustomed to billing items to their phone.

These dialers were also used for some pretty serious fraud in the past, so they have a bit of a bad stigma.

[SheepGuy]

I promoted a dialer program from England years ago, and somehow managed to install the dialer on my backup PC. It all went fine until I had to use my backup PC on a dialup connection for a couple of days. While I thought I was hooking up to my local ISP I was dialing Tristan da Cunha in the Indian Ocean every time I went online.
Got a nice phone bill for around $1200.
To make things even worse, the company never paid me, though they did send me a Christmas card.

[JohnnyR]

Originally Posted by SheepGuy

I promoted a dialer program from England years ago, and somehow managed to install the dialer on my backup PC. It all went fine until I had to use my backup PC on a dialup connection for a couple of days. While I thought I was hooking up to my local ISP I was dialing Tristan da Cunha in the Indian Ocean every time I went online.
Got a nice phone bill for around $1200.
To make things even worse, the company never paid me, though they did send me a Christmas card.

ofc they didn't pay you, you cheating bastard hihihi

Oh yes and I do believe dialers are also those things where you have to dial a phone number (which has a special cost) to get a password for a certain site.