Does this sound like your story? You see pop-up ads from lp.optionridge.com while browsing websites that in general don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to bypass the built-in pop-up blockers in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari. Perhaps the lp.optionridge.com popups appear when clicking search results from Google? Or does the pop-ups appear even when you’re not browsing?

Here’s a screenshot of the lp.optionridge.com pop-up ad when it showed up on my machine:

If you also see this on your system, you most likely have some adware installed on your computer that pops up the lp.optionridge.com ads. So don’t write angry emails to the website you were browsing, the ads are most likely not coming from them, but from the adware on your system. I’ll try help you with the lp.optionridge.com removal in this blog post.

Those that have been following this blog already know this, but for new visitors: Not long ago I dedicated some of my lab systems and intentionally installed a few adware programs on them. Since then I’ve been following the behaviour on these machines to see what kinds of adverts that are displayed. I’m also looking on other interesting things such as if the adware updates itself automatically, or if it downloads additional unwanted software on the computers. I first observed the lp.optionridge.com pop-up on one of these lab systems.

optionridge.com resolves to the 198.154.246.184 IP address and lp.optionridge.com to 209.240.101.226. lp.optionridge.com was registered on 2015-01-07.

According to YouGetSignal’s reverse lookup service, the following domains are also located on 209.240.101.226:

• arabcapitalmarket.com
• binarysecretsignals.com
• fxglance.com
• marketstriker.com
• www.corprocess.com
• www.fxglance.com
• www.hy-media.co
• www.itzikmarko.co.il
• www.thetradingdonkey.com

So, how do you remove the lp.optionridge.com pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the lp.optionridge.com ads I had istartsurf, Movie Wizard and MedPlayerNewVersion installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the lp.optionridge.com pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in Mozilla Firefox.

The bad news with pop-ups such as this one is that it can be initiated by many variants of adware. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups.

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

1. What software do you have installed if you look in the Add/Remove programs dialog in the Windows Control Panel? Something that you don’t remember installing yourself or that was recently installed?
2. You can also check the browser add-ons. Same thing here, do you see something that you don’t remember installing?
3. If that did not help, you can give FreeFixer a try. FreeFixer is built to assist users when manually tracking down adware and other types of unwanted software. It is a freeware utility that I’ve been working since 2006 and it scans your system at lots of locations where unwanted software is known to hook into your machine. If you would like to get additional details about a file in FreeFixer’s scan result, you can just click the More Info link for that file and a web page with a VirusTotal report will open up, which can be very useful to determine if the file is safe or malware:

   

Here’s a video tutorial showing FreeFixer in action removing pop-up ads:

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

Thank you!