Can confirm. I have not paid, and I am under-rested.

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.

to be fair it’s entirely believable that this government would do that

under the rest