Lots of people by now have had the experience of clicking on a web page and then all of a sudden you get this onslaught of popups and audible warnings telling you about how your computer is infected and you need to call Microsoft. First of all, they are not Microsoft. Microsoft does not monitor your computer in that way. The only interaction your computer has with Microsoft is that it automatically checks in with the Microsoft update server to see if your computer is missing any updates. That is done automatically in the background without you having to do anything. If there are updates it will prompt you to install them when you shut down the computer.

So how do these popups occur? They occur when you click on an ad that is really a site that runs malicious computer code on your computer that will show the fake popups. The problem we have today is that we live in a world where everything revolves around advertising and ad revenue. Most people will tell me that they were not going to suspicious sites when this popup occurred. That does not matter. So many of these situations I have dealt with came through perfectly legitimate sites where a person just happened to click on the wrong thing. Facebook is notorious for these popups. I see that more and more on their site. The problem with all of this advertising is that nobody cares what ads are running on their site and they don’t vet any of these advertisers. The scammers just buy ad space and put this on the site. Sites like msn.com are notorious for these ads. We call these ads click bait. Click bait is ads that look interesting and tempt you to click on them.

Below is a screenshot of the Microsoft popup that is fake. I will often be accompanied by a monotonous sounding voice telling you to not shut down your computer. They are doing all they can to make this sound real and get you to call them. Don’t!

DO NOT PANIC! This is generally a rather lame issue that is easily fixable in about two minutes. The problem occurs when you call them. They want to get on your computer so that they can continue to show you that this just has to be real.

**********DO NOT CALL THAT PHONE NUMBER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE******

If you call that phone number the scammer is going to be a foreign sounding voice and it is normally from a call center in India. He or she is going to get you to install remote access software on your computer where they can get full access to everything. They typically use perfectly legitimate software like Team Viewer, Ultra Viewer and such to log on to your machine. Keep in mind that this software is NOT on your computer. They will instruct you on where to download the software from and how to install it. DON’T! If you do this they are going to bring up dialog boxes of normal things that are happening on your computer and tell you that someone is trying to hack your computer. That is all lies! Then they will want to charge you $300 or so to do absolutely nothing. Nothing needs to be fixed.

The fix for this is very simple. There are two ways and I will just give you the easiest one. What you want to do is take your finger and press down and hold the physical power button on the computer. This is the button you use to turn the computer on when you start it. DO NOT just press the button for one second and let go. That will just put the computer to sleep and when you turn it back on you will have the same problem. Hold the power button down for probably 10 seconds until the computer just shuts down. What we are doing is forcing the computer to shut down.

Once your computer shuts down it has gotten rid of the popup. The problem is gone. Turn you computer back on now. Open up your web browser that you were using when this occurred and just stop right there. Your web browser is what you use to surf the web such as Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, etc. Because you forced the computer to shut down like we did, you will get a message that will pop up in the upper right corner. Below are some examples from different browsers. You will notice in every one of these screenshots below that there is a message that says that it did not shut down correctly. THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT WE WANT! We purposefully shut them down that way because we want to unlock the computer. This is what we do to get rid of the scammers.

This is very important! DO NOT click on the “Restore” button. If you do that you will go right back to the website that locked the computer up to begin with. That restore button opens the tabs that you had open before we forced it down. You will notice that I have a red arrow in the photo below that points to a small X to the right of it. To my knowledge most all browsers do this. Just click on that “x” and you will be back to normal. Now you can go right on about your business. The problem is solved! That is all it takes!

If you do want to have some fun you can call the scammer and play with their heads. Just fiddle and fumble around and act like you don’t understand them. Don’t go to any websites to download anything they tell you and waste their time. You can make them pretty furious and waste some of their time if you’re in the mood.