Did you just get a pop-up from consumersurveys.com-ads.net and wonder where it came from? Did the consumersurveys.com-ads.net ad appear to have been popped up from a web site that under normal circumstances don’t use aggressive advertising such as pop-up windows? Or did the consumersurveys.com-ads.net pop-up show up while you clicked a link on one of the major search engines, such as Google, Bing or Yahoo?

Here’s how the consumersurveys.com-ads.net pop-up looked like when I got it on my system:

Does this sound like your system, you apparently have some adware installed on your computer that pops up the consumersurveys.com-ads.net ads. So don’t flame the people that owns the web site you were at, the advertisements are presumably not coming from that website, but from the adware that’s installed on your system. I’ll do my best to help you remove the consumersurveys.com-ads.net pop-up in this blog post.

For those that are new to the blog: A little while back I dedicated some of my lab computers and purposely installed a few adware programs on them. Since then I’ve been monitoring the behaviour 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 updates itself, or if it downloads additional unwanted software on the systems. I first observed the consumersurveys.com-ads.net pop-up on one of these lab systems.

consumersurveys.com-ads.net resolves to 104.18.43.82 and so does com-ads.net. consumersurveys.com-ads.net was registered on 2013-03-19.

So, how do you remove the consumersurveys.com-ads.net pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the consumersurveys.com-ads.net ads I had TinyWallet, BlockAndSurf and BrowserWarden installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the consumersurveys.com-ads.net 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 consumersurveys.com-ads.net ads, the answer is probably yes. Check out the traffic rank from Alexa:

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

To remove the consumersurveys.com-ads.net pop-up ads you need to examine your computer for adware or other types of unwanted software and uninstall it. Here’s my suggested removal procedure:

The first thing I would do to remove the consumersurveys.com-ads.net 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 suspect in there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if some program was installed approximately about the same time as you started observing the consumersurveys.com-ads.net pop-ups.

The next thing to check would be your browser’s add-ons. Adware often appear under the add-ons dialog in Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Is there anything that looks suspicious? Something that you don’t remember installing?

I think you 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 tracked down 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 require you to pay for the program just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

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

Here you can see FreeFixer in action removing pop-up ads:

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

Thank you!