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

Here’s how the ampxchange.com pop-up looked like when I got it on my machine:

Does this sound like what you are seeing, you almost certainly have some adware installed on your machine that pops up the ampxchange.com ads. So there’s no idea contacting the owner of the website you currently were browsing. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll try help you with the ampxchange.com removal in this blog post.

For those that are new to the blog: Some time ago I dedicated some of my lab computers and wilfully installed some adware programs on them. I’ve been following 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 installs additional unwanted software on the computers. I first spotted the ampxchange.com pop-up on one of these lab systems.

ampxchange.com resolves to 108.60.149.204.

So, how do you remove the ampxchange.com pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the ampxchange.com ads I had SSFK.exe, PhaseProfessor, Wajam, PrimaryColor, YTDownloader, WebShield, SFKEX64.exe, FastSearch and mystartsearch installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the ampxchange.com pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in Mozilla Firefox.

If you are wonder if there are many others out there also getting the ampxchange.com ads, the answer is probably yes. Check out the traffic rank from Alexa:

The problem 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.

Anyway, here’s my suggestion for the ampxchange.com ads removal:

1. Examine what programs you have installed in the Add/Remove programs dialog in the Windows Control Panel. Do you see something that you don’t remember installing or that was recently installed?
2. How about your browser add-ons. Anything in the list that you don’t remember installing?
3. If that didn’t help, you can give FreeFixer a try. FreeFixer is built to assist users when manually tracking down adware and other types of unwanted software. It is a freeware utility that I’ve been working since 2006 and it scans your machine at lots of locations where unwanted software is known to hook into your machine. If you would like to get additional details about a file in FreeFixer’s scan result, you can just click the More Info link for that file and a web page with a VirusTotal report will open up, which can be very useful to determine if the file is safe or malware:

   

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

Thank you!