Does this sound like your story? You see pop-up ads from sweepstakewins.com while browsing sites that typically don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to get round the built-in pop-up blockers in Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Maybe the sweepstakewins.com pop-ups appear when clicking search results from the Google search engine? Or does the pop-ups show up even when you’re not browsing?

Here’s a screenshot of the sweepstakewins.com pop-up ad when it showed up on my machine when it showed up in a new tab:

Does this sound like your computer, you almost certainly have some adware installed on your system that pops up the sweepstakewins.com ads. Contacting the site owner where you were browsing would be a waste of time. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll try help you with the sweepstakewins.com removal in this blog post.

Those that have been visiting this blog already know this, but for new visitors: A little while back I dedicated a few of my lab systems and deliberately installed a few adware programs on them. Since then I’ve been monitoring the actions 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 additional unwanted software on the machines. I first observed the sweepstakewins.com pop-up on one of these lab computers.

sweepstakewins.com was created on 2015-01-12. sweepstakewins.com resolves to 104.130.78.210.

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

The issue with pop-ups like the one described in this blog post is that it can be initiated by many variants of adware, not just the adware running on my machine. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups.

So, what can be done? To remove the sweepstakewins.com pop-up ads you need to review your system for adware or other types of unwanted software and uninstall it. Here’s my suggested removal procedure:

1. What software do you have installed if you look in the Add/Remove programs dialog in the Windows Control Panel? Something that you don’t remember installing yourself or that was recently installed?
2. How about your add-ons that you have in your browser. Anything in the list 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:

   

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

Thank you!