The virus scan did not pick it up. This malware embeds itself in my Chrome Browser settings and gives itself permission to send lots of nogus notifications which, if clicked on, would further open my phone to worse problems. Anyways, I found the captchasafe website in my permitted datasharing list. Once removed, the problem went away.

Someone came to the house and found no virus. Eventually we brought our device to the store. They sent it out. Then we were told a virus was found to have interfered with virus detection app.

enable stuff in settings or global settings

I'm kind of like, one browser, one category of uses. I used EFFs Cover Your Tracks on all of them, and found out some of the ones that tout their privacy come with default settings that don't protect any such thing. It was quite enlightening.

However, this did not come from a browser. It came from my notifications, the things you see if you swipe down from the top of the home screen.

I scanned it with everything I could find that I recognized as being legit. Malwarebytes seemed the most thorough. That one took nearly an hour. Everything said I didn't have any issues, and I would certainly assume that anything that showed up in notifications would be from an app that was already installed, but it's still annoying and puzzling. I guess my next thing will be to go through the apps one by one and see if anything has notifications turned on that I didn't realize had notifications turned on. I hate it when stuff like this happens.

Theory one is that a pre-installed game that had never said a word to me before all of a sudden decided to send this notification. I checked all my games, and the ones that I had installed myself were not allowed notifications, but a few of the pre-installed ones had notifications allowed but had never bugged me. When I install something myself the first thing I do is turn off notifications unless I want them, but I hadn't thought about any of the pre-installed stuff unless it brought itself to my attention.

Theory two is that some hacker has come up with a way to send you fake notifications. That is a scary thought. However, I can't think of any way that I would have given anyone an opening to do that. I do try to be careful.

Every virus and malware app that I ran said I was fine, but I'm going to check and see if there's any such thing as a web scan for phones like there is for computers.

Any suggestions appreciated.

If anybody is interested.

I was already using Duck Duck Go's local VPN even though it took me until today to realize that's what it was. I installed another program that had a local VPN this morning, but it turned out that VPN interfered with using Samsung Smart View to cast my exercise classes to my TV. So I turned that one off and that's when I realized that the Duck Duck Go one was a VPN that did not interfere with the casting.

I still kept the app that had the VPN though, because it enables you to selectively turn off all internet access for apps and several other useful things. It is called Netguard. I can't find out how to turn the VPN back off when it's enabled, so I guess I'm going to have to uninstall it and reinstall it.

I also got Glasswire, which I've had on my Windows computer for quite a while and did not realize it had an Android app. As soon as I installed it I was able to see all the apps that had accessed the internet recently and how much data they used. I didn't see anything suspicious.

I had one called Wi-FiAnalyzer that I just uninstalled because it insists on having location access, but I'm going to try to find something similar that shows all the Wi-Fi devices on your network. Or maybe just reinstall that one and use it occasionally and then turn location back off. I'd rather have one that doesn't require location permission at all.

So I'm sort of happy now. I'm never completely happy about security on my phone or computer.

It has to be turned on for it to do its other stuff. Maybe I'll keep it and remember to turn it off when I want to cast to the tv.