Triangle boxes on top of android phone

[John1397]

On the top of screen on android there are triangle boxes when you pull them down get message  from Google is this real?

[Allan]

It's a scam. Do not click on any links in the message. You can go to airplane mode and delete your browsing history in Chrome to clear the message:

https://forums.androidcentral.com/samsung-galaxy-s5-active/682695-i-have-alert-says-my-system-heavily-damaged-four-virus-my-phone-real-2.html

[thecomputerbride]

+1 on this. I had a scary experience with this virus where I had clicked the link and my phone actually got compromised and rebooted itself. If your data is backed up (i.e., synced to a cloud) I would highly suggest factory resetting it too.

[Allan]

No need to factory reset anything. It's a scam message, nothing more.

[MichaelNyby]

Thank you for the warning about that 30 days stuff, but I am very new to all this android phone stuff and would like to ask about the triangle boxes. I get it about that message the OP showing in that image being a scam, but the triangle boxes themselves are of interest in this post.

Whether a message is a scam or real, does that triangle box thingy up there show itself? I mean, just when exactly does that triangle box show up there?

You see, I was given an android phone by my family last year just before checking into the hospital for what everyone knew would be a lengthy stay and we needed a new communications device, so I am quite new to all this android stuff. Never paid the tool any mind before last year.

So what's the deal with those triangle thingies? When do they appear? Just a rough summary is fine, thank you. Or a link to an excellent paper that covers that, would be much appreciated.

[BC_Programmer]

The boxes at the top are the notifications. Apps can display notifications and give updates- news items and weather, for example. In this case a scam app was able to trick the OP into enabling push notifications on a website in some manner. The "triangle boxes" are just the icon used by the push notification sent by the scam website.

Basically those notifications reflect what items you see when you swipe down. I have a Google news and a Weather icon because there is a notification each from those apps on my phone that I've not dismissed, for example.

This can occur to an extent on desktop machines as well, A rather dumb (IMO) feature has been present for some time in web browsers which allows websites to push notifications through the web browser. 90% of the time they are used to try to trick people into phoning microsoft or whatever with fake notifications. (Not that anybody wants the "legitimate" ones either)

[MichaelNyby]

On this one I confess to still being a tad confused.

Am I understanding correctly that simply using SMS or Notepad or accessing "Settings" or the photo folder does not cause any triangle thingies to appear? I ask that way because I tried all of those and saw no triangle thingy.

I don't much care for accessing any of the Google stuff that might take me online because I am not fully understanding a lot of what Google is up to on the Android device and it seems that getting information about what Google is up to isn't so easy.

In fact, I read some academic's paper that we have far less control over what goes on with the Android device than when using a laptop or other 'normal' computer.

Also it seems that Google wants to tie all sorts of things into anything I do on the Android and that just doesn't suit me one bit. I mean, I don't see a lot of requests asking permissions to tie something into this or that. I should use the past tense, "didn't see" because I tried to study that while I was in the hospital and then gave up.

I haven't had that much time since then to study the ins-and-outs of this Android stuff, but I am sure that I don't trust Google so much on that device.

But I certainly would know better than to click on any message that was not from any family member or the company that is allowing us the Family Plan my family folks set up with this thing. Although I must admit that fake Google message in the OP's post's image could easily fool folks, couldn't it? But even that one would not have tempted me to click on anything in the message. I'm way too paranoid about Net stuff.

And this post has sure gotten way too long, hasn't it? Sorry about that.