Does this sound familiar? You see pop-up ads from adcash.com while browsing at websites that in general don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to get round the built-in pop-up blockers in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari. Perhaps the adcash.com pop-ups turn up when clicking search results from Google? Or does the pop-ups appear even when you’re not browsing?

Here is how the adcash.com pop-up window looked like on my computer:

After a while, it redirected to another site which showed the actual advert. The adcash.com server appears to run PHP based on the script name: pop_packcpm.php. The actual URL is http://www.adcash.com/script/pop_packcpm.php.

Does this sounds like your experience, you most likely have some adware installed on your machine that pop up the adcash.com ads. Contacting the owner of the site you were browsing would be a waste of time. They are not responsible for the ads. I’ll try help you to remove the adcash.com pop-ups in this blog post.

I found the adcash.com pop-up on one of the lab machines where I have some adware running. The adware was installed on purpose, and from time to time I check if something new has appeared, such as pop-up windows, new tabs in the browsers, injected ads on webpages that usually don’t  how ads, or if some new files have been saved to the hard-drive. That’s where I first noticed the adcash.com pop-up.

adcash.com was registered on 2000-11-20, so it has been around for some time. According to domaintools.com, adcash.com is located on 67.227.226.194 and there’s another domain resolving to the same IP called openadserving.com. When I tested to ping adcash.com it resolved to 72.52.178.205. On that IP there seems to be few other domains which appears to be related, based on a reverse IP lookup over at YouGetSignal.com.

• ad.adsphinx.com
• adca.sh
• adsphinx.com
• cashtrafic.com

So, how do you remove the adcash.com pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the adcash.com ads I had CheckMeUp, BuyNSave, TinyWallet and BrowserWarden installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the adcash.com pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in Mozilla Firefox.

Judging from Alexa’s traffic rank, adcash.com is getting tremendous amounts of traffic:

The issue with this type of pop-up is that it can be launched by many variants of adware. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups.

Anyway, here’s my suggestion for the adcash.com ads removal:

The first thing I would do to remove the adcash.com pop-ups is to examine the programs installed on the machine, by opening the “Uninstall programs” dialog. You can open this dialog from the Windows Control Panel. If you are using one of the more recent versions of Windows you can just type in “uninstall” in the Control Panel’s search field to find that dialog:

Click on the “Uninstall a program” link and the Uninstall programs dialog will open up:

Do you see something suspicious in there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if something was installed approximately about the same time as you started observing the adcash.com pop-ups.

The next thing to check would be your browser’s add-ons. Adware often appear under the add-ons menu in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari. Is there anything that looks suspicious? Something that you don’t remember installing?

I think you will be able to identify and uninstall the adware with the steps outlined above, but in case that did not work you can try the FreeFixer removal tool to identify and remove the adware. FreeFixer is a freeware tool that I started develop about 8 years ago. Freefixer is a tool built to manually identify and uninstall unwanted software. When you’ve identified the unwanted files you can simply tick a checkbox and click on the Fix button to remove the unwanted file.

FreeFixer’s removal feature is not locked down like many other removal tools out there. It won’t require you to pay a fee just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

And if you’re having a mess determining if a file is clean or unsafe in the FreeFixer scan result, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up your browser with a page which contains more details about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be quite useful:

Are you a Mac or Linux user and get the adcash.com pop-ups? What did you do to stop the pop-up in your browser? Please share in the comments below. Thank you!

Did you find any adware on your machine? Did that stop the adcash.com ads? Please post the name of the adware you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.

Thank you!