Did you just get a pop-up ad from ars.couphole.com and wonder where it came from? Did the ars.couphole.com ad appear to have been popped up from a web site that under normal circumstances don’t use aggressive advertising such as pop-up windows? Or did the ars.couphole.com pop-up show up while you clicked a link on one of the big search engines, such as Google, Bing or Yahoo.?

Here’s how the ars.couphole.com pop-up looked like when I got it on my machine:

(Sorry for the large number of watermarks. If I don’t add them, the screenshot will be used without attribution at some other blogs)

Does this sounds like what you are seeing, you most likely have some adware installed on your machine that pop up the ars.couphole.com ads. So don’t write angry emails to the site you were browsing, the advertisements are almost certainly not coming from them, but from the adware on your system. I’ll do my best to help you with the ars.couphole.com removal in this blog post.

Those that have been reading this blog already know this, but for new visitors: Recently I dedicated a few of my lab computers and wilfully installed a few adware programs on them. Since then I have been observing the behaviour on these computers to see what kinds of advertisements that are displayed. I’m also looking on other interesting things such as if the adware auto-updates, or if it downloads and installs additional unwanted software on the computers. I first found the ars.couphole.com pop-up on one of these lab machines. I got the pop up in Firefox, but it can appear in Chrome and Internet Explorer too.

ars.couphole.com resolves to the 37.58.101.205 IP address. The ars.couphole.com domain was created on 2014-09-18, and the Whois record was updated today. The domain inb.csrvrgroup.com is mentioned in the URL. That domain seems to appear in all pop-ups of this type.

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

BlockAndSurf was the adware that caused the pop-ups in my case. The pop up was labelled “BlockAndSurf“.

What label did your pop-up ad have? Please share in the comments area below.

The issue with this type of pop-up is that it can be launched by many variants of adware. I think that adware such as NewPlayer, CheckMeUp and SaferSurf can also be responsible for the ars.couphole.com popups. And there are probably other variants too. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups.

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

The first thing I would do to remove the ars.couphole.com pop-ups is to examine the programs installed on the machine, by opening the “Uninstall programs” dialog. You can find 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 dubious listed there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if some program was installed about the same time as you started seeing the ars.couphole.com pop-ups.

I think you will be able to identify and uninstall the adware with the two 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 like many other removal tools out there. It won’t require you to pay for the program just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

And if you’re having a mess deciding if a file is legit or adware in FreeFixer’s scan report, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up a web page which contains more details about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be very useful:

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

Did this blog post help you to remove the ars.couphole.com pop-up ads? Please let me know or how I can improve this blog post.

Thank you!