Having a mess with pop-ups from luckstars.co that bypass the pop-up killers in your browser? If so, you might have adware installed on your system. I got the luckstars.co pop-ups in Firefox, but they can show up if you are using Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari or Opera too.

Here’s a screen capture of the luckstars.co pop-up ad when it showed up on my machine:

If this description sounds like what you are seeing, you apparently have some adware installed on your system that pops up the luckstars.co ads. There’s no use contacting the owners of the site you currently were browsing. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll try help you to remove the luckstars.co pop-ups in this blog post. This is done by removing the unwanted adware from your machine.

If you have been spending some time on this blog already know this, but if you are new: Recently I dedicated a few of my lab machines and knowingly installed a few adware programs on them. Since then I’ve been tracking the actions 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 downloads and installs additional unwanted software on the computers. I first observed the luckstars.co pop-up on one of these lab systems.

luckstars.co was created on 2012-12-01. luckstars.co resolves to the 85.25.106.19 IP address.

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

Anyway, here’s my suggestion for the luckstars.co ads removal:

The first thing I would do to remove the luckstars.co pop-ups is to examine the software 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 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 seeing the luckstars.co pop-ups.

The next thing to check would be your browser’s add-ons. Adware often appear under the add-ons menu in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari or Opera. 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 about 8 years ago. Freefixer is a tool built to manually find 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 crippled like many other removal tools out there. It won’t require you to purchase the program just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

And if you’re having a hard time deciding if a file is clean or unsafe in FreeFixer’s scan result, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up a web page which contains more details 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 you find any adware on your machine? Did that stop the luckstars.co ads? Please post the name of the adware you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.

Thank you!