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

Here is how the Groupon ad looked like on my computer. It had groupon.se domain:

If this sounds like what you are seeing on your computer, you almost certainly have some adware installed on your system that pops up the groupon.se ads. Don’t write angry emails to the site you were currently browsing, the advertisements are most likely not coming from them, but from the adware on your computer. I’ll try help you to remove the adware that caused the groupon.se pop-ups in this blog post.

Groupon is a website that features discounted gift certificates. It’s a pretty big company, please read more on Wikipedia.

Those that have been visiting 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’ve been following the actions on these machines 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 additional unwanted software on the machines. I first observed the groupon.se pop-up on one of these lab systems.

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

The issue with pop-ups such as this one is that it can be launched by many variants of adware, not just the adware on my system. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups.

So, what should done to solve the problem? To remove the groupon.se pop-up ads you need to examine your system for adware or other types of unwanted software and uninstall it. Here’s my suggested removal procedure:

The first thing I would do to remove adware 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 suspect in 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 getting the groupon.se pop-ups.

The next thing to check would be your browser’s add-ons. Adware often show up under the add-ons menu in Firefox, Chrome, 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 remove 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 track down and uninstall unwanted software. When you’ve tracked down 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 for the program just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

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

Here’s a video tutorial showing FreeFixer in action removing pop-up ads:

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

Thank you!