My favorite story about this is I had a friend who was smart but quick to jump to conclusions and not technical.
He had a roommate who sometimes used his computer. He comes home one day to a message on the screen, full screen saying “This computer is locked by the NSA. We have detected illegal activity including child pornogry(yes spelt that way). You may send $300 in Walgreens gift card codes to (some yahoo email address I forget) or you will be arrested. This computer can not be unlocked.”
He panics thinking his roommate did something, shut down the computer, removed the hard drive and memory.
Two years later I hear about this and tell him it’s fake and let me take a look at it. Turns out the computer was not" locked". I got into the system by booting into safe mode. There was a program added to the start up folder of the start menu(this was in windows xp). That program literally just launched a window with that message, set to full screen with no close button. Out of curiosity I rebooted the system message popped up and I just hit alt-f4 and had full control of the system. These scans are designed for people to panic and not think critically.
This a actually worked out for a co-worker. He interviewed for a position and the interview went of like 6 hours. He waited 6 months and never heard anything. He applied for another position at my company. Different team, lower pay and not in his specialized field. He got that job. Another 3 months and the boss for the first job called him and said their initial hire didn’t work out and asked if he was still interested.
He laughed and said he was already working but would be interested. The boss asked where he was working. He replied “I’m actually down stairs”.
He got the job, more money then the initial offer and he was happy in the new position. Probably an unlikely event and I wouldn’t recommend trying to duplicate it.