Does this sound familiar? You see pop-up ads from app.couplineup.com while browsing web sites that generally 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. Maybe the app.couplineup.com pop-ups appear when clicking search results from Google? Or does the popups appear even when you’re not browsing?

Here is a screenshot on the app.couplineup.com pop-up from my computer:

Update: 2014-12-02, 15:22: Now Mozilla Firefox reports and blocks app.couplineup.com as a “Web Forgery”:

If this description sounds like what you are seeing, you probably have some adware installed on your system that pop up the app.couplineup.com ads. So don’t flame the people that runs the web site you were at, the advertisements are most likely not coming from that website, but from the adware that’s running on your machine. I’ll try help you to remove the app.couplineup.com pop-ups in this blog post.

If you have been following this blog already know this, but if you are new: A little while back I dedicated some of my lab computers and deliberately installed some adware programs on them. I’ve been tracking the actions on these machines to see what kinds of ads that are displayed. I’m also looking on other interesting things such as if the adware updates itself automatically, or if it installs additional unwanted software on the machines. I first spotted the app.couplineup.com pop-up on one of these lab machines.

app.couplineup.com was created on Created on 2014-09-18. app.couplineup.com resolves to 208.43.241.247.

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

BlockAnSurf was the adware that caused the pop-ups in my case. The pop-up was labelled “Ads by BlockAndSurf“.

What label did your pop-up ad have? Please share by posting a comment below.

The issue with this type of pop-up is that it can be launched by many variants of adware. I think that adware such as CheckMeUp, SaferSurf, NewPlayer and Salus can also be responsible for the app.couplineup.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 app.couplineup.com ads removal:

The first thing I would do to remove the app.couplineup.com pop-ups is to examine the software installed on the machine, by opening the “Uninstall programs” dialog. You can open 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 listed 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 app.couplineup.com pop-ups.

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

I think most users will be able to identify 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 started develop many years ago. Freefixer is a tool designed to manually track down and uninstall 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 won’t require you to pay for the program just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

And if you’re having difficulties determining if a file is legitimate or malware in FreeFixer’s scan report, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up your browser with a page which contains more details about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be quite useful:

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

Are you a Mac or Linux user and get the app.couplineup.com pop-ups? What did you do to stop the pop-up in your browser? Please share in the comments below. Thank you very much!

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

Thank you!