> How would a scammer bring in a steady stream of new customers?

Spam email campaigns. Or google ad campaigns. Twitter bot spam.

There’s lots of ways to get people to click on Amazon links and make money. Especially because I think Amazon gives you the 4% of anything they buy in the next 24 hours or some period. Since a large percent of humans have Amazon accounts and buy stuff pretty recently if you can just get your affiliate cookie on their browser, you could make quite a bit.