Does this sound familiar? You see pop-up adverts from activities.aliexpress.com while browsing at websites that generally don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to escape the built-in pop-up blockers in Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Maybe the activities.aliexpress.com pop-ups appear when clicking search results from Google? Or does the pop-ups appear even when you’re not browsing?

Here’s a screen dump of the activities.aliexpress.com pop-up ad when it showed up on my computer:

Update 2015-05-03: I’ve also seen the best.aliexpress.com domain in use in pop ups:

If this description sounds like your experience, you probably have some adware installed on your machine that pops up the activities.aliexpress.com ads. Contacting the site owner for the site you were browsing when you got the pop-up would be a waste of time. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll do my best to help you with the activities.aliexpress.com removal in this blog post. This is done by removing the unwanted adware.

For those that are new to the blog: Recently I dedicated a few of my lab machines and wilfully installed a few adware programs on them. Since then I have been observing the behaviour 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 updates itself automatically, or if it downloads and installs additional unwanted software on the computers. I first noticed the activities.aliexpress.com pop-up on one of these lab machines.

So, how do you remove the activities.aliexpress.com pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the activities.aliexpress.com ads I had BlockAndSurf, TinyWallet and BrowserWarden installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the activities.aliexpress.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.

The problem with pop-ups such as this one is that it can be popped up by many variants of adware, not just the adware on my system. I think that adware such as NewPlayer, SaferSurf, SpeedCheck and CheckMeUp can also be responsible for the activities.aliexpress.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 activities.aliexpress.com ads removal:

The first thing I would do to remove the activities.aliexpress.com 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 OS 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 listed 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 seeing the activities.aliexpress.com pop-ups.

Then I would check the browser add-ons. Adware often appear under the add-ons dialog in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari or Opera. Is there something that looks suspicious? Something that you don’t remember installing?

I think most users will be able to track down 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. It’s a tool designed to manually track down and remove 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 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 a hard time deciding if a file is legit or adware 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 more information about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be very useful:

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

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

Thank you!