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

Here’s how the ask.couplose.com pop-up looked like when I got it on my machine.

(I know, lots of watermarks. Have to do it to stop the copy-cats.)

Does this sounds like your computer, you almost certainly have some adware installed on your system that pop up the ask.couplose.com ads. Don’t flame the people that owns the website you were at, the ads are almost certainly not coming from that website, but from the adware that’s running on your computer. I’ll do my best to help you remove the ask.couplose.com in this blog post.

For those that are new to the blog: Not long ago I dedicated some of my lab computers and deliberately installed a few adware programs on them. I have been monitoring the behaviour on these computers to see what kinds of ads that are displayed. I’m also looking on other interesting things such as if the adware updates itself automatically, or if it downloads and installs additional unwanted software on the machines. I first found the couplose.com pop-up on one of these lab systems.

ask.couplose.com resolves to the 208.43.241.245 address. ask.couplose.com was registered on 2014-09-18.

So, how do you remove the ask.couplose.com pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the ask.couplose.com ads I had TinyWallet, BuyNSave and BlockAndSurf installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the ask.couplose.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. I know this since the pop-up ad had a label with the adware name: “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, Salus, CheckMeUp and SaferSurf can also be responsible for the couplose.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 ask.couplose.com ads removal:

1. Check what programs you have installed in the Add/Remove programs dialog in the Windows Control Panel. Do you see something that you don’t remember installing or that was recently installed?
2. You can also examine the add-ons you installed in your browsers. Same thing here, do you see something that you don’t remember installing?
3. If that didn’t help, I’d recommend a scan with FreeFixer to manually track down the adware. FreeFixer is a freeware tool that I’m working on that scans your computer at lots of locations, such as browser add-ons, processes, Windows services, recently modified files, etc. If you want to get additional details about a file in the scan result, you can click the More Info link for that file and a web page will open up with a VirusTotal report which will be very useful to determine if the file is safe or malware:

   

Here’s a video tutorial which shows FreeFixer in action removing adware causing pop-up ads:

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

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

Thank you!