Does this sound like what you are seeing right now? You see pop-up ads or new tabs from primescratchcards.com while browsing websites that normally don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to escape the built-in pop-up blockers in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari or Opera. Perhaps the primescratchcards.com pop-ups show up when clicking search results from the Google search engine? Or does the pop-ups turn up even when you’re not browsing?

Here’s a screenshot of the primescratchcards.com pop-up ad when it showed up on my machine in a new tab:

Does this sound like your machine, you almost certainly have some adware installed on your computer that pops up the primescratchcards.com ads. There’s no use contacting the owners of the web site you were browsing. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll try help you with the primescratchcards.com removal in this blog post.

If you have been reading this blog already know this, but if you are new: Recently I dedicated a few of my lab machines and purposely installed a few adware programs on them. I have been tracking the behaviour on these computers 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 installs additional unwanted software on the machines. I first found the primescratchcards.com pop-up on one of these lab machines.

primescratchcards.com resolves to the 199.83.130.104 address.

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

Judging from Alexa’s traffic rank, primescratchcards.com is getting some traffic:

The issue with this type of pop-up 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.

Anyway, here’s my suggestion for the primescratchcards.com ads removal:

The first thing I would do to remove the primescratchcards.com pop-ups or new tabs 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 strange-looking in there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if something was installed about the same time as you started seeing the primescratchcards.com pop-ups.

Then I would check the browser add-ons. Adware often show up under the add-ons dialog in Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Is there something that looks suspicious? Something 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. Freefixer is a tool built to manually track down and uninstall 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 purchase the program just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

And if you’re having difficulties figuring out if a file is clean or unsafe in FreeFixer’s scan report, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up a web 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:

Are you a Mac or Linux user and get the primescratchcards.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 primescratchcards.com ads? Please post the name of the adware you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.

Thank you!