Does this sound like what you are seeing right now? You see popup surveys from prizesuncle.xyz 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 or Safari. Perhaps the prizesuncle.xyz pop-ups appear when clicking search results from Google? Or does the pop ups appear even when you’re not browsing?

Here is a screen capture on the prizesuncle.xyz pop-up survey from my computer:

If this description sounds like what you are seeing, you most likely have some adware installed on your machine that pops up the prizesuncle.xyz ads. So don’t blame the people that runs the web site you were at, the ads are presumably not coming from that web site, but from the adware that’s running on your computer. I’ll do my best to help you remove the prizesuncle.xyz pop-up in this blog post.

Those that have been visiting this blog already know this, but here we go: Recently I dedicated some of my lab computers and knowingly installed a few adware programs on them. I’ve been observing 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 auto-updates, or if it installs additional unwanted software on the computers. I first noticed the prizesuncle.xyz pop-up survey on one of these lab machines.

prizesuncle.xyz resolves to the 184.73.247.179 address and ittzz.promorewards.prizesuncle.xyz to 74.207.254.163. prizesuncle.xyz was created on 2014-11-19.

So, how do you remove the prizesuncle.xyz pop-up surveys? On the machine where I got the prizesuncle.xyz ads I had TinyWallet, BrowserWarden and BlockAndSurf installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the prizesuncle.xyz 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 prizesuncle.xyz ads removal:

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. How about your browser add-ons. Anything in the list that you don’t remember installing?
3. If that did not help, I’d recommend a scan with FreeFixer to manually track down the adware. FreeFixer is a freeware tool that I’m working on that scans your computer at lots of locations, such as browser add-ons, processes, Windows services, recently modified files, etc. If you want to get additional details about a file in the scan result, you can click the More Info link for that file and a web page will open up with a VirusTotal report which will be very useful to determine if the file is safe or malware:

   

Here’s a video tutorial which shows FreeFixer in action removing adware that caused pop-up ads:

Did you find any adware on your machine? Did that stop the prizesuncle.xyz ads? Please post the name of the adware you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.

Thank you!