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Hey Would it be impossible for a brand new 'bone' stock Android phone to be infected with malicious software from Scareware or Prize pop-ups? I have seen about five of them since getting the phone and setting it up - most were spoofing Google, saying my device was infected. The most recent was spoofing Amazon saying I won $1,000. I had been using Chrome only while accessing the internet on my home wifi network while signed into my Google account, and shutting down the phone after the Google spoofs occurred. On the most recent last pop up that was spoofing Amazon, I answered the three survey questions, and shut down the phone right away ( I know, I took the bait and I was stupid) but hey, Amazon really does promote through their 3rd party affiliates a sweepstakes. It's posted on their actual site. Anyway, I just purchased an Essential PH-1 which has zero, nada, no reports of adware/malware ever being shipped on any phone. Essential Products is new start up that just released their first flagship phone last year. I've downloaded only one app onto this phone from Play Store since buying it (late December), but I was already receiving the Scareware before I downloaded the app. The only other scenario I can think of that might have started this on my phone is Chrome sync is involved someway. I called my ISP to ask them to run diagnostics to find if an attacker changed my DNS server setting, or if my router's remote admin interfaces we're hacked. They said nothing seemed to show evidence of this occuring. Consider then if any data had been maliciously manipulated by an attacker who got control of one desktop which uses a Chrome browser (specifically an unsupported Chrome browser on an unsupported Windows OS desktop), would it be then possible that this data could be spread via Chrome sync and cause spoofing scareware to appear on the Android phone? (Only one Google account exists). Here is how I understand what might explain this better. Google Chrome (both the desktop and mobile versions) records a significant amount of data – from internet browsing activity, bookmarks, tabs, passwords, and more – and syncs across all of the devices logged into with that Google account. As soon as a login into a brand new device is made with that Google account, all of the previously synced data is brought over and saved to the new device, resulting in an overhaul of the Chrome application on that device. Can this be possible?? I know Chrome for mobile doesn't have extensions or apps. If not, could someone provide another explanation? And back to asking the original question again after reading this thread, Would it be impossible for a brand new stock Android to be infected with malware from Scareware / pop-ups?