Sound familiar? You see pop-up ads from freelotto.com while browsing sites that normally don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to escape the built-in pop-up blockers in Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Maybe the freelotto.com pop-ups turn up when clicking search results from Google? Or does the pop-ups show up even when you’re not browsing?

Here is a screenshot on the freelotto.com pop-up from my machine:

If this sounds like what you are seeing on your system, you almost certainly have some adware installed on your machine that pops up the freelotto.com ads. Contacting the site owner of the site you were browsing would be a waste of time. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll try help you with the freelotto.com removal in this blog post.

Those that have been reading this blog already know this, but here we go: A little while back I dedicated a few of my lab computers and deliberately installed some adware programs on them. Since then I have been tracking the actions 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 auto-updates, or if it downloads additional unwanted software on the systems. I first spotted the freelotto.com pop-up on one of these lab machines.

freelotto.com was created on 1996-10-23. freelotto.com resolves to the 64.14.48.177 IP address. www.freelotto.com to resolves to the same IP.

So, how do you remove the freelotto.com pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the freelotto.com ads I had Salus, PriceFountain, PriceLess, SpeedCheck and OfferBoulevard installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the freelotto.com pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in Firefox.

If you are wonder if there are many others out there also getting the freelotto.com ads, the answer is probably yes. Check out the traffic rank from Alexa:

Freelotto.com is getting a huge amount of traffic.

The issue with this type of pop-up is that it can be popped up by many variants of adware, not just the adware running 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 freelotto.com ads removal:

The first thing I would do to remove the freelotto.com pop-ups is to examine the programs installed on the machine, by opening the “Uninstall programs” dialog. You can reach 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 dubious in there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if some program was installed about the same time as you started observing the freelotto.com 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? Anything that you don’t remember installing?

I think you 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 started develop about 8 years ago. It’s a tool designed to manually find 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 a fee just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

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

Here’s a video guide showing how to remove pop-up ads with FreeFixer:

Are you a Mac or Linux user and get the freelotto.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 you find any adware on your machine? Did that stop the freelotto.com ads? Please post the name of the adware you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.

Thank you!