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

Here is how the charmingdate.com ad looked like on my machine when it popped up in a new browser window:

If this sounds like what you are seeing on your computer, you most likely have some adware installed on your system that pops up the charmingdate.com ads. Contacting the owner of the site that you were visiting would be a waste of time. They are not responsible for the adverts. I’ll do my best to help you remove the charmingdate.com pop-up in this blog post. This is done by removing the unwanted adware from your machine.

For those that are new to the blog: A little while back I dedicated some of my lab machines and deliberately installed some adware programs on them. I’ve been monitoring the behaviour on these machines 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 machines. I first observed the charmingdate.com pop-up on one of these lab systems.

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

The bad news with pop-ups such as this one is that it can be popped up by many variants of adware, not just the adware running on my system. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups.

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

1. What software do you have installed if you look in the Add/Remove programs dialog in the Windows Control Panel? Something that you don’t remember installing yourself or that was recently installed?
2. How about your add-ons that you have in your browser. Anything in the list that you don’t remember installing?
3. If that did not help, I’d recommend a scan with FreeFixer to manually track down the adware. FreeFixer is a freeware tool that I’m working on that scans your computer at lots of locations, such as browser add-ons, processes, Windows services, recently modified files, etc. If you want to get additional details about a file in the scan result, you can click the More Info link for that file and a web page will open up with a VirusTotal report which will be very useful to determine if the file is safe or malware:

   

Here’s a video tutorial showing FreeFixer in action removing pop-up ads:

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

Thank you!