Ok, it's past midnight here, about 20 to one in the morning, and I'm playing a game on my desktop. The phone rings. The phone NEVER rings here late at night. NEVER. I almost jumped out of my skin, my heart starts racing because my mind is going in overdrive as to all the bad shit that must have befallen my son, or some other member of my family.

So I brace myself, and answer it.... and it's a fucking recording announcing I've "won" a trip to Disneyworld in FL. So I hang up the phone and my desktop goes down. Just stops. No shutdown, just boom, off. So now I start to smell something, and it smells..... like electrical fire ya know?? Like something electrical burned. So now I'm really wondering what the hell is going on, so I look at my desktop, it looks okay.....

So I press the button to power it back on. And I can see flames inside, and immediately let go of the button, and now the smell is even worse.

WHAT IN THE FUCK HAS JUST HAPPENED TO ME?????

No, this is NOT an April Fool joke, god how I wish it were. What in the holy fuck has just happened?? Can the NSA send some kind of signal over the phone to fry a targeted computer??? WHAT IN THE HOLY FUCK??? HAS ANYONE EVER IN ALL THEIR LIVES HEARD OF ANYTHING LIKE THIS????

No, I've never heard of coincidences. I don't even know the word and if somebody explained it to me I couldn't even grasp the concept.

Yeah, coincidence at the exact right split second, when the phone never ever rings here at night.

The odds of it being a coincidence and occurring at exactly that moment are astronomical, yet of course that's the default position.

And everyone gets phone calls in the middle of the night announcing trips to Disneyland. It happens all the time.

What game were you playing?

Wouldn't be much of a coincidence otherwise. Well, the odds of winning the lottery are also astronomical but that never keeps people from winning the jackpot, sometimes even more than once. You think scammers' autodialers care about the time of day?

It sounds like your PSU probably gave up the ghost. As for the timing, creepy coincidence. Trust me, it happens. More often than you might think, too.

I had a PSU explode once. Well, I say explode, it's not like shrapnel was flying around the living room, but there was a bang, my computer died, and a cloud of smoke poured out the back of it. When I removed it from the cabinet, there were no outward signs that anything had happened to it, but it was completely dead. Thankfully, none of the other components were damaged, and I had a spare PSU lying around, so I was soon up and running again.

Sounds like there was some kind of electrical surge. >_<
(Or maybe something made a connection and shorted inside your case?)

Something similar claimed my old 486 back in the day. -_-

If you're lucky the flames you saw were just replaceable wiring and not your boards, either way you have my condolences. T_T

I don't doubt the possibility of it being a coincidence, because if I did, I'd have bigger problems than a fried PC.

But it strikes me as funny that when you consider the staggering, in the trillion trillions to one, odds of getting such a phone call, of having me answer it and press the hang up button at precisely the same time the PC goes off, and the fact that phone calls and internet all come through the same wire that is hooked up to the PC, that if you even wonder whether it's a coincidence you must be some sort of nut, conspiracy theorist.

Because you know, the trillion trillion trillion to one odds MUST be the right explanation.

Crazy coincidences happen all the time. While the odds of any particular weird coincidence like this one happening are extremely low, there is also a near-infinite amount of events that you would perceive as a freaky coincidence. You can multiply an extremely large number by an extremely small number and get a number that's roughly of order one.

No need to go that far. Nobody is calling you a nut or conspiracy theorist. Just apply Occam's Razor to the situation.

In one case, you have a scammer autodialling you, which happens to coincide with your PSU breaking down.

In the other case, a number of things would have to be true:
1. Your motherboard was deliberately manufactured with a built-in kill switch which can be activated through a network connection.

2. Your PSU was deliberately manufactured to support the kill-switch function, and to commit suicide when it is activated.

3. Your ADSL router was deliberately manufactured to send the kill-switch signal to your computer under specific circumstances and can be triggered via the phone line.

4. The scammers who made the phone call know all of these things and have access to them.

5. The scammers have decided that anyone who doesn't fall for the scam should have their computers set on fire.

What are the odds of all those things being true?

Wow, that's some Silent Hill level shit right there. Was the announcement in the recording done in a very over the top, carny style?

Mickey does not like to be hung up on.

I very seriously doubt the odds are anywhere near that high.

Maybe the porn was just too hot...
;)

Yes and I lost my video card and psu in nearly the same way. However I did find the cause - I had a Nvidia Video card, and a specific Driver version. At a specific time in seconds elapsed since 1970 the video card fan shut off due to a driver bug. shortly there after the system went during a wow game right after I fired up skype for a out of game call. Once I got back online on my backup system, I contacted the video card manufacturer, who explained the situation. They sent me a new card, new psu and new memory (the cpu turned out fine as did the mb).

a few weeks later a storm occurred that set my husbands computer on fire - we had wired it wrong and it outside of the ups protected wiring zone.

A year later the ups went up, taking two psu's and three hard drives with it in the most frightening of surge events I've ever been party to. a Friend later pointed out that I should have taken the first event more seriously and replaced everything related to power then since likely the ups was going bad even then and may have been the first cause and the video driver issue may have been the first warning of a surge protection failure.

So - I suggest that you check your wiring, surge protector/ups and looks carefully at anything internal with a fan :<