What is scareware?

[Android Central Question]

Recently I put out this question on a Q&A site, about when I recieved scareware popups from visiting a website. The scareware sounded my speaker and knew my device model and alerted me to having viruses. Nothing within these popups was opened. If anyone has anymore information on this scareware, I'd be greatful.

Here is the reply I got. Do not fully understand it though. Can anyone elaborate?

Reply:
You don't have to click. When it shows up, it has already been loaded onto your device. Clicking anything may simply re-direct you to some web site or download something.
The fact it displayed your device model and make means it scanned your BIOS or other parts of your operating system. It does not mean you have a virus, just that you ran some script that identified these things. There is common Java script that can do this, and your browser reports much of this information to the web site itself. Other web sites may query your browser for more information than that.

What dose this reply mean by when it shows up, it's already been loaded onto my device. Loaded what?? Also about scanning my BIOS? Would my BIOS have been scanned and infected? Any guidance would be ever so helpful. Am worried about my device obviously for infections. Kaspersky, Malwarebytes, Dr.Webb, Avast, all state clean, Viruses: 0. But is this really the case?

Many thanks.

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! It'd be helpful if you registered on this forum, so that you can reply within a thread you created. It makes it much easier to have a discussion: https://forums.androidcentral.com/ask-question/409154-join-android-central-community.html. I was trying to locate you original thread, and can't find it using the Search function.

I'm not sure what the respondent meant by that first part. I agree that you don't have a virus, though. It's easy for a site to identify what device you're running -- whoever created that little popup ad just converted that data into voice. The only thing you need to do is either ignore those bogus popups, or avoid the website that served them up altogether.