Sound familiar? You see pop-up survey ads from consumers-survey.com while browsing on websites that in general don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to sidestep the built-in pop-up blockers in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari or Opera. Maybe the consumers-survey.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 consumers-survey.com pop-up looked like when I got it on my system:

(Sorry for the large number of watermarks. If I don’t add them, the screenshot will be used without attribution at some other blogs)

Does this sound like what you see your system, you most likely have some adware installed on your machine that pops up the consumers-survey.com ads. Contacting the owner of the website would be a waste of time. They are not responsible for the ads. I’ll do my best to help you remove the consumers-survey.com pop-up in this blog post.

Those that have been following this blog already know this, but for new visitors: Some time ago I dedicated a few of my lab machines and wilfully installed some adware programs on them. Since then I’ve been tracking the behaviour on these systems 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 observed the consumers-survey.com pop-up on one of these lab computers.

consumers-survey.com resolves to 104.20.85.174. consumers-survey.com was registered on 2015-09-30.

So, how do you remove the consumers-survey.com pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the consumers-survey.com ads I had gosearch.me, Live Malware Protection, Windows Menager and SmartComp Safe Network installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the consumers-survey.com pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in Mozilla Firefox.

It seems as consumers-survey.com is getting quite a lot of traffic, based on Alexa’s traffic rank:

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

Anyway, here’s my suggestion for the consumers-survey.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. You can also examine the add-ons you installed in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari. Same thing here, do you see something 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:

   

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

Thank you!