Did you just get a pop-up from surveys-online.com.mxtrax.link and ponder where it came from? Did the surveys-online.com.mxtrax.link ad appear to have been initiated from a web site that under normal circumstances don’t use aggressive advertising such as pop up windows? Or did the surveys-online.com.mxtrax.link pop-up show up while you clicked a link on one of the big search engines, such as Google, Bing or Yahoo?

Here is how the surveys-online.com.mxtrax.link survey ad looked like on my computer:

If this description sounds like your computer, you most likely have some adware installed on your system that pops up the surveys-online.com.mxtrax.link ads. So there’s no idea contacting the owner of the site you were browsing. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll try help you to remove the surveys-online.com.mxtrax.link pop-ups in this blog post.

If you have been following this blog already know this, but if you are new: Recently I dedicated a few of my lab systems and deliberately installed some adware programs on them. Since then I’ve been following the actions 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, or if it installs additional unwanted software on the machines. I first found the surveys-online.com.mxtrax.link pop-up on one of these lab computers.

surveys-online.com.mxtrax.link resolves to the 8.29.158.163 IP address. surveys-online.com.mxtrax.link was created on 2014-11-03 and is protected by WhoisGuard INC.

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

It seems as surveys-online.com.mxtrax.link is getting quite a lot of traffic since November 2014, based on Alexa’s traffic rank:

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

Anyway, here’s my suggestion for the surveys-online.com.mxtrax.link ads removal:

The first thing I would do to remove the surveys-online.com.mxtrax.link pop-ups is to examine the software 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 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 something was installed approximately about the same time as you started getting the surveys-online.com.mxtrax.link pop-ups.

Then you can examine you browser add-ons. Adware often turn up under the add-ons dialog in Mozilla Firefox, Google 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 track down 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 about 8 years ago. It’s a tool built to manually identify and remove unwanted software. When you’ve tracked down 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 issues figuring out if a file is clean or unwanted in FreeFixer’s scan report, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up a web page which contains more information about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be very useful:

Here’s a video guide showing how to remove pop-up ads with FreeFixer:

Did this blog post help you to remove the surveys-online.com.mxtrax.link pop-up ads? Please let me know or how I can improve this blog post.

Thank you!