Is this a virus or scam?

aardvaak

OH turned her laptop and a message came up saying you have gone to a dangerous site phone 0800 ...... to sort it out.

She had not gone to any doggey sites and had just turned it on.

She immediately crashed the computer a did a virus scan

forgotmyname

What site did they visit prior to the message?

It may have been an advert on the site.

Thats the problem with sites selling space to companies that resell it. You never
know who is buying the advert space and what naughty tricks they are trying.

Which ISP? TalkTalk by any chance?

shaun_from_Africa

aardvaak wrote: »

She had not gone to any doggy sites and had just turned it on.

Blaming the doggies again?

SouthUKMan

This is a well known known scam. Do not respond to it. If you call the number you will get through to a scummy scam call centre that will want to remotely dial into your PC to either plant phishing software (to capture records of the websites you visit along with usernames and passwords, etc) or to remotely lock / encrypt your data so that you then pay the scummy scammers a ransom fee for them to unlock it. The pop up messages usually talk about alerting Microsoft and government authorities to the fact that you have been visiting !!!!!! websites, etc. All a load of old rubbish of course designed to scare you into calling them. PS. Sometimes the 'pop up window' containing these messages is difficult or seemingly impossible to close. In which case just simply restart your computer.

aardvaak

shaun_from_Africa wrote: »

Blaming the doggies again?

How very clever

aardvaak

forgotmyname wrote: »

What site did they visit prior to the message?

It may have been an advert on the site.

Thats the problem with sites selling space to companies that resell it. You never
know who is buying the advert space and what naughty tricks they are trying.

Which ISP? TalkTalk by any chance?

ISP BT
Site unknown as a couple of days ago last booted

aardvaak

SouthUKMan wrote: »

This is a well known known scam. Do not respond to it. If you call the number you will get through to a scummy scam call centre that will want to remotely dial into your PC to either plant phishing software (to capture records of the websites you visit along with usernames and passwords, etc) or to remotely lock / encrypt your data so that you then pay the scummy scammers a ransom fee for them to unlock it. The pop up messages usually talk about alerting Microsoft and government authorities to the fact that you have been visiting !!!!!! websites, etc. All a load of old rubbish of course designed to scare you into calling them. PS. Sometimes the 'pop up window' containing these messages is difficult or seemingly impossible to close. In which case just simply restart your computer.

How did they get it onto the computer?

FreeBear

aardvaak wrote: »

How did they get it onto the computer?

Had one of these pop-ups infect a laptop and had hooked itself into the registry so appeared almost as soon as you turned it on - Best I can tell, it came attached to an Adobe Acrobat reader update from an untrusted source.

AndyPix

Sometimes this presents as a popup window in kiosk mode that is coded so it is very difficult to close.


There is also a malware variant that presents in this way.


Alt+F4 will close the popup version.
Malwarebytes will rid you of the malware version.


https://www.malwarebytes.com/mwb-download/thankyou/