Does this sound familiar? You see pop-up ads from rewardspanel.co while browsing websites that in general don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to get round the built-in pop-up blockers in Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Perhaps the rewardspanel.co pop ups appear when clicking search results from Google? Or does the pop-ups show up even when you’re not browsing?

Here’s how the rewardspanel.co pop-up looked like when I got it on my computer:

Does this sound like your story, you presumably have some adware installed on your computer that pops up the rewardspanel.co ads. So there’s no idea contacting the owner of the site you currently were browsing. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll try help you to remove the rewardspanel.co pop-ups in this blog post.

I found the rewardspanel.co pop-up on one of the lab systems where I have some adware running. I’ve talked about this in some of the previous blog posts. The adware was installed on purpose, and from time to time I check if something new has appeared, such as pop-up windows, new tabs in the browsers, injected ads on web site that usually don’t show ads, or if some new files have been saved to the hard-drive.

rewardspanel.co was registered on 2015-01-20. rewardspanel.co resolves to the 46.166.161.6 address.

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

The issue with this type of pop-up is that it can be launched by many variants of adware, not just the adware running on my computer. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups.

So, what should done to solve the problem? To remove the rewardspanel.co pop-up ads you need to review your machine 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 examine the add-ons you installed in Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Same thing here, do you see anything 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 this blog post help you to remove the rewardspanel.co pop-up ads? Please let me know or how I can improve this blog post.

Thank you!