Does this sound like your story? You see pop-up advertisements from tap-2-call.us in a new tab while browsing sites that commonly don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to escape the built-in pop-up blockers in Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Maybe the tap-2-call.us pop-ups show up when clicking search results from Google? Or does the pop-ups appear even when you’re not browsing?

Here is how the tap-2-call.us ad looked like on my machine when it appeared in a new tab:

If this sounds like what you are seeing on your system, you probably have some adware installed on your machine that pops up the tap-2-call.us ads. So there’s no use contacting the site owner. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll do my best to help you with the tap-2-call.us removal in this blog post. That’s done by removing the unwanted adware.

I found the tap-2-call.us pop-up on one of the lab machines where I have some adware running. I’ve talked about this in some of the previous blog posts. 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 website that usually don’t show ads, or if some new files have been saved to the hard-drive.

tap-2-call.us resolves to 72.52.227.164. tap-2-call.us was registered on 2012-10-15. Here’s the traffic rank, thanks to Alexa:

It seems like the tap-2-call.us site has been getting quite a lot of traffic since February 2015.

So, how do you remove the tap-2-call.us pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the tap-2-call.us ads I had BlockAndSurf, TinyWallet and BrowserWarden installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the tap-2-call.us pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in Mozilla Firefox.

The bad news with pop-ups like the one described in this blog post 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.

So, what can be done to solve the problem? To remove the tap-2-call.us pop-up ads you need to examine your computer 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 the tap-2-call.us pop-ups is to examine the programs installed on the machine, by opening the “Uninstall programs” dialog. You can reach 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 in there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if some program was installed approximately about the same time as you started getting the tap-2-call.us pop-ups.

Then you can examine you browser add-ons. Adware often show up under the add-ons menu in Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Is there anything that looks suspicious? Something that you don’t remember installing?

I think most users will be able to find 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’ve developed since 2006. Freefixer is a tool designed to manually identify and remove 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 crippled 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 issues deciding if a file is legitimate or malware in the FreeFixer scan report, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up your web browser with a page which contains additional details about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be very useful:

Here’s a video guide showing how to remove pop-up ads with FreeFixer:

Did you find any adware on your machine? Did that stop the tap-2-call.us ads? Please post the name of the adware you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.

Thank you!