I accidentally clicked on a sketchy site on my phone while trying to find my old art account. The weird site doesn’t show up when searched. What is it? Do I possibly have malware?
So, for context, I used to post artwork on Tumblr in middle school, but I stopped posting in my freshman year of high school. Many years later, I’m still an artist, and I felt nostalgic this morning while I was drawing. I wanted to compare my old art to my new art.
I couldn’t remember if I had deleted my old Tumblr account, or just logged out. So I looked up my old username on my phone and found a bunch of different, but similar website names. I thought that it was an account on Tumblr that was reposting my old art. I was curious, so I clicked on it.
It instantly said I had like 44 viruses on my phone. I knew it was fake, so I clicked the “back” button to go back to the google page, but then a 12 minute long video popped on my screen, but nothing played (it was so strange, it was a black screen with no audio and it said I needed a VPN to view this pop-up video?)
So I just kept spamming “back” until I was back on the google page. I took screenshots of the sketchy sites and just looked up the website names, but nothing popped up. It’s very strange. Could someone explain why all of that occurred? Is my phone at risk of any malware or viruses? I have no clue what those websites are. Thank you! (Sorry for any bad English, by the way. Not my first language)
(The “websites” were called: TumbleSpot and TumbleNest, with a red background and a white heart). I wish I could submit photos but it won’t let me. :(
Posted Sep 2, 2025, 3:28 PM UTC