Does this sound familiar? You see pop-up ads from ant.coupmatchup.com while browsing web sites that normally don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to bypass the built-in pop-up blockers in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox or Internet Explorer. Perhaps the ant.coupmatchup.com popups appear when clicking search results from Google? Or does the pop-ups appear even when you’re not browsing?

If this description sounds like your experience you most likely have some adware installed on your system that pop up the ant.coupmatchup.com ads. So don’t write angry emails to the site you were browsing, the ads are most likely not coming from them, but from the adware on your machine 🙂 I’ll try help you with the ant.coupmatchup.com removal in this blog post.

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

Sorry for the extensive use of watermarks in the screenshot, but if I don’t watermark it some copy-cat bloggers will use it in their blogs 🙂

Those that have been reading this blog already know this, but here we go: Recently I dedicated a few of my lab machines and deliberately installed a few adware programs on them. I’ve been following the behaviour on these machines to see what kinds of different advertisements that are displayed. I’m also looking on other interesting things such as if the adware updates itself, or if it downloads and installs additional unwanted software on the machines. I first spotted the ant.coupmatchup.com pop-up on one of these lab machines.

So, how do you remove the ant.coupmatchup.com pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the ant.coupmatchup.com ads I had the CheckMeUp adware  and the TinyWallet adware installed. I removed these with FreeFixer and that stopped the ant.coupmatchup.com pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in Firefox. CheckMeUp was the adware that caused the pop-ups in my case. I could see this since it was kind enough to label the pop-up ad with the adware name:

What label did your pop-up ad have? Please share in the comments area below.

The issue  with this type of pop-up is that it can be launched by many variants of adware. I think the following adware programs can also be responsible for the ant.coupmatchup.com popups:

• BlockAndSurf
• NewPlayer
• SaferSurf
• Salus

And probably many other variants of adware programs too, which makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups. Anyway, here’s my suggestion for the ant.coupmatchup.com ads removal:

The first thing I would do to remove the ant.coupmatchup.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 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 suspicious in there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if something was installed approximately about the same time as you started seeing the pop-ups.

The next thing to check would be your browser’s add-ons. Adware often appear under the add-ons menu in Mozilla Firefox, Google’s Chrome and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Is there anything that look suspicious? Something that you don’t remember installing?

I think most users will be able to identify the adware with the two 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 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 will not ask you to pay for the program just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

And if you’re having problem determining if a file is malware or clean in the FreeFixer scan result, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up a web page which contains additional information about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be very useful:

Are you a Mac or Linux (Ubuntu) user and get the ant.coupmatchup.com pop-ups? A few users reported that removing some unwanted browser extension in Chrome solved the problem. What did you do to stop the ant.coupmatchup.com pop-ups on your Mac or Linux machine? Please share in the comments below. Thank you very much!

Did this blog post help you to remove the ant.coupmatchup.com pop-ups ads? Please let me know or how I can improve this blog post.

Thank you!