Mousetrapping is a technique that prevents users from exiting a website through standard means.
Sometimes these windows run like stand-alone applications and cause the taskbar and browser menu to become inaccessible.
[5] Thus, if someone seeking the BettyCrocker website typed BettyCroker, the user would become ensnared in the mousetrapper's system.
Once the viewer is at the site, a Javascript or a click induced by, as one example, promises of free samples, redirects the viewer to a URL and regular site of the mousetrapper's client-advertiser, who (the FTC said in the Zuccarini case) pays 10 to 25 cents for capturing and redirecting each potential customer.
An FTC press release explaining why the agency opposes mousetrapping states: Schemes that capture consumers and hold them at sites against their will while exposing Internet users, including children, to solicitations for gambling, psychics, lotteries, and pornography must be stopped.