Does this sound like your story? You see pop-up ads from inclk.com while browsing websites that generally don’t advertise in pop-up tabs. The pop-ups manage to escape the built-in pop-up blockers in Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari. Perhaps the inclk.com pop-ups show 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 inclk.com pop-up tab from my machine:

The URL mentions zo6.adservlite.com.

If this description sounds like what you are seeing, you almost certainly have some adware installed on your system that pops up the inclk.com ads. So there’s no idea contacting the owner of the site you were browsing. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll try help you with the inclk.com removal in this blog post.

For those that are new to the blog: Recently I dedicated a few of my lab computers and knowingly installed a few adware programs on them. Since then I’ve been following 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 automatically, or if it installs additional unwanted software on the machines. I first spotted the inclk.com pop-up on one of these lab machines.

inclk.com was created on 2013-04-18. inclk.com resolves to 173.192.117.111. Here’s the inclk.com traffic rank, thanks to Alexa:

The site is getting quite a lot of traffic.

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

The problem with this type of pop-up is that it can be popped up by many variants of adware. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups.

So, what should done to solve the problem? To remove the inclk.com pop-up ads you need to examine your machine 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 inclk.com pop-ups is to examine the programs 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 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 shady 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 seeing the inclk.com pop-ups.

Then I would check the browser add-ons. Adware often show up under the add-ons dialog in Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari. Is there something that looks suspicious? Anything that you don’t remember installing?

I think most users will be able to identify and uninstall 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. It’s a tool designed to manually track down and remove 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 locked 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 troubles figuring out if a file is legitimate or malware in FreeFixer’s scan report, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up your web browser with a page which contains additional details about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be quite useful:

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 inclk.com ads? Please post the name of the adware you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.

Thank you!