If you are getting bombarded with pop-ups ads from ace.couprace.com you have some adware installed on your machine. I got the pop-up in Firefox, but it can also appear if you are browsing the web with Chrome or Internet Explorer. Here’s how the pop-up ad look on my computer:
I got the pop-ups when clicking links in Google’s search results. I think the ads can appear when using other search engines such as Yahoo and Bing. This raised some red flags since these search engines never shows ads in pop-ups.
I’ve noticed this type of pop-up ad triggered by adware such as BlockNSurf, New Player, Speed Check and SaferSurf. Sometimes the pop-up window is labeled with the adware name. Mine was labeled “Ads by BlockAndSurf” in the upper right corner of the browser:
Were the ace.couprace.com ads you were getting also labeled? Please post what the label said on your machine. Thanks!
So, if you’d like to stop the ace.couprace.com pop-up ads, I’d check if I could find something suspicious on the computer by looking in the Add/Remove programs dialog in the Windows Control Panel. You can sort on the “Installed On” date to see if somehing was added recently.
You can also check your browser’s add-ons to see if you find something there.
If that does not help, try the freeware FreeFixer tool to track down the adware launching the pop-ups. Tip: If you don’t know if a file in FreeFixer’s scan result is legitimate or adware, click the More Info link for that file. It will show a VirusTotal report for the file which will help a lot.
Thank you for reading. Did this help you remove the ace.couprace.com pop-ups?
Update 2014-11-14: Thanks to “Ainigma” for reporting in that the ace.couprace.com pop-ups can appear when running Linux based Ubuntu and Google Chrome.
I’ve been keeping an eye on the Google Analytics page for this blog post, and there are some indications that Mac users are also seeing the ace.couprace.com ads. If you are a Mac user and get the ace.couprace.com popup, please post a comment below. What browser do you use? Did you find out how to remove the adware responsible for the ace.couprace.com pop-ups?
Seems like it’s mostly users from Europe and Southeast Asian that are having problems with the couprace.com ads. Are you also from this part of the world? I’m living in Sweden.
Jag kör ubuntu (linux) 14.04 och ändå har jag fått den där när jag kör Chrome. Har inte hittat vad det är men antar att det är bland mina addons.
Translation to English by Roger:
“I’m running Ubuntu (Linux) 14.04 and get that pop-up when running Chrome. I have not found the root-cause but I guess it’s one of my add-ons.”
Ja, kolla vilka Chrome-tillägg du har. Skulle gissa att problemet finns där. Posta göra namnet på tillägget du tog bort, eller om du löste problemet på nåt annat sött.
And the same thing in English:
“Yeah, please check the add-ons that you have installed in Chrome. I would guess that you can find the problem there. Please post the name of the add-on you removed, or if you found another solution to the problem.”