Sound familiar? You see pop-up ads from cpayard.com while browsing 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 cpayard.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 a screenshot on the cpayard.com pop-up from my machine:

(Sorry for the ridiculous use of watermarks. I have to do it to stop the copy-cats.)

Does this sound like what you see your system, you apparently have some adware installed on your machine that pops up the cpayard.com ads. So there’s no idea contacting the owner of the web site you currently were browsing. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll try help you with the cpayard.com removal in this blog post.

If you have been visiting this blog already know this, but if you are new: A little while back I dedicated a few of my lab computers and knowingly installed some adware programs on them. I have 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 spotted the cpayard.com pop-up on one of these lab computers.

cpayard.com was created on 2013-10-15. cpayard.com resolves to the 8.29.157.12 IP address. According to DomainTools and YouGetSignal are the following sites located on the same IP:

• connect2forties.com
• connect2fifties.com
• dates4single.com
• just4single.com
• www.dietyard.com
• www.getyourmatch.com
• www.just4singleparents.com
• www.landtreff.de
• www.marksmanelectronicsandsecurity.com
• youlucky2014.com

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

The cpayard.com domain is attracting quite a lot of traffic, just check out the Alexa traffic rank:

The issue with this type of pop up is that it can be initiated 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.

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

The first thing I would do to remove the cpayard.com pop-ups is to examine the software installed on the machine, by opening the “Uninstall programs” dialog. You can find this dialog from the Windows Control Panel. If you are using one of the more recent versions of Windows Operating System 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 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 observing the cpayard.com pop-ups.

The next thing to check would be your browser’s add-ons. Adware often appear under the add-ons menu in Chrome, 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 find 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’ve developed since 2006. Freefixer is a tool built to manually find and uninstall unwanted software. When you’ve found 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 a fee just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

And if you’re having problems figuring out if a file is legit or adware in FreeFixer’s scan result, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up your browser with a page which contains additional 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 cpayard.com pop-up ads? Please let me know or how I can improve this blog post.

Thank you!