Monday 3-18-24, When attempting to login to their Lee County Electric Coop website and pay their monthly bill, some Windows desktop users got an error virus which looked like an official Microsoft Windows Warning (don't they all.) The virus locked up the monitor screen with blinking boxes and stated the the user's computer had been essentially hijacked, that the user should not turn off the computer and instead call a phone number to unfreeze the computer.

Apple users did not get such messages.

While always scary, the windows desktop virus protection is now-a-days pretty robust and there are several hardware security features that also come into play. However, after turning off the machine it did reboot normally and virus quick scans discovered nothing. If worried and you have the time, do a deep scan. After a clean boot always reboot again since Windows remembers the last configuration and you want the last config to be a good one.

Of course calling that phone number would be the wrong thing to do since that then opens you up to really taking over your machine and being actually scammed.