My grandparent once wanted me to fix their tablet which they said had a virus. I couldn't find anything so I went to the web browser. A tab was up which said "Your Android has 5 viruses please download our antivirus to clean your phone"

It had the fake gif flashing alerts and whatnot so I simply closed out of the tab and deleted all of the recent "antiviruses" which had been downloaded

To this day they think I'm a technical genius for the easiest "fix" I've ever done.

Oh and merry Christmas everybody! I'm new here but it seems like a great community of people :)

Welcome buddy, happy Christmas. Believe me you'll have fun here and sooner or later you'll get addicted. Nice story though. xD

My mother got a similar one on the pc but it was very cleverly done.

It stated that it had locked the computer to protect it and offered a phone number for assistance and despite being a webpage it actually manage to make everything unresponsive.

You could not click anything.

Once I was there I quickly found that alt+tab worked and then found another browser window that tried to open a password protected site using http 401 login.

They had manage to trigger this site and then open the window with the phone number so it covered the login dialog and since the dialog is modal it prevented any other window or the start menu from responding.

@Voxera oh my, for an attempt at either a scam or a virus that sounds extremely well thought out; I wouldn't typically expect a webpage to be that much of an issue, but that sounds annoying.