Does this sound familiar? You see pop-up ads from playmillion.com in new tabs while browsing web sites that generally don’t advertise in pop-ups. The pop-ups manage to evade the built-in pop-up blockers in Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Perhaps the playmillion.com pop-ups show up when clicking search results from the Google search engine? Or does the pop-ups appear even when you’re not browsing?
Here’s how the playmillion.com pop-up looked like when I got it on my system when it appeared in a new tab:
If this sounds like what you are seeing on your machine, you almost certainly have some adware installed on your computer that pops up the playmillion.com ads. So there’s no idea contacting the owner of the website you currently were browsing. The adverts are not coming from them. I’ll try help you to remove the playmillion.com pop-ups in this blog post.
Those that have been following this blog already know this, but for new visitors: Some time ago I dedicated some of my lab machines and knowingly installed some adware programs on them. Since then I have been monitoring the actions on these computers to see what kinds of ads that are displayed. I’m also looking on other interesting things such as if the adware updates itself, or if it installs additional unwanted software on the computers. I first found the playmillion.com pop-up on one of these lab machines.
So, how do you remove the playmillion.com pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the playmillion.com ads I had TinyWallet, BlockAndSurf and BrowserWarden installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the playmillion.com pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in Mozilla Firefox.
The issue with popups such as this one is that it can be popped up by many variants of adware, not just the adware on my machine. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups.
Anyway, here’s my suggestion for the playmillion.com ads removal:
The first thing I would do to remove the playmillion.com pop-ups is to examine the programs installed on the machine, by opening the “Uninstall programs” dialog. You can open 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 suspicious listed 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 playmillion.com pop-ups.
Then I would check the browser add-ons. Adware often appear under the add-ons dialog in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari. Is there anything that looks suspicious? Anything 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 identify 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 down like many other removal tools out there. It won’t require you to pay for the program just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.
And if you’re having a hard time determining if a file is clean 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 details about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be very useful:
Did you find any adware on your machine? Did that stop the playmillion.com ads? Please post the name of the adware you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.
Thank you!