A Microsoft pop-up led her to a crypto ATM and hours on the phone

According to WSAZ-TV, a Wisconsin woman named Beth lost money after a pop-up window claiming to be from Microsoft Office told her that her computer had been breached. The pop-up carried a phone number. She called it.

The person who answered said he was a fraud investigator. He told her the breach had turned up pornography on her computer. He gave her an ID number. Nothing about the call felt rushed or careless. 'They have everything in place that they need to make you think it's real,' Beth said.

The scam depends on keeping her on the phone

Once Beth believed the story, the caller told her to get in her car. He told her to go to her bank and withdraw cash, and to stay on the line the entire time. He gave her a cover story to use if a bank teller asked questions: tell them it is for a renovation project. The instruction to stay on the phone is the part that does the work. It is not a side detail. It stops her from calling anyone else, checking anything else, or pausing long enough to doubt what she is being told.

From the bank, he directed her to a specific gas station with a cryptocurrency kiosk, a machine she had never seen before. She fed cash into it, repeatedly, while he stayed on the line. Investigators say criminals favor these kiosks because a crypto transfer, once made, usually cannot be reversed. That is the second thing the scam depends on: once the money crosses into the machine, there is no bank to call and no transaction to dispute.

Beth believed the matter was closed after that. It was not. The caller stayed on the phone, nearly four hours in total, and then asked for more: five thousand dollars in gift cards from Home Depot. She went to the store. She was standing at the checkout, waiting for a manager's approval on the purchase, when something broke through. 'All of a sudden it hit me that was a scam,' she said.

That moment is worth paying attention to, because it did not come from a warning, a bank employee, or a police officer. Sgt. Sheldon Pedranzan of the Outagamie County Sheriff's Office says officers have tried to intercept victims at crypto kiosks directly and been told, to their faces, that the call is real. The break came from inside her own thinking, at the second checkout, not the first. The FBI says Americans lost more than $388 million dollars to these scams in 2025, a 58% increase on the year before.

A pop-up warning about a security breach is not evidence of one. A real investigator does not ask for cash, a crypto deposit, or gift cards, and does not need a victim to stay on the phone to prove anything.