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

Here’s a screenshot of the survygenie.com pop-up ad when it showed up on my system:

If this sounds like what you are seeing on your system, you probably have some adware installed on your system that pops up the survygenie.com ads. So there’s no idea contacting the owner of the site you were browsing. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll do my best to help you with the survygenie.com removal in this blog post.

I found the survygenie.com pop-up on one of the lab machines 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.

survygenie.com was created on 2014-04-08. survygenie.com resolves to 8.29.141.189. According to YouGetSignal’s reverse lookup service, the following domains are also located on the same server:

• acidflop.com
• finland.survygenie.com
• mleadz.com
• sweden.survygenie.com
• www.getdates.info
• www.mleadz.com

So, how do you remove the survygenie.com pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the survygenie.com ads I had Windows Menager, SmartComp Safe Network, gosearch.me and Live Malware Protection installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the survygenie.com pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in Mozilla Firefox.

It seems as survygenie.com is getting quite a lot of traffic, based on Alexa’s traffic rank:

The problem 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 system. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups.

So, what can be done to solve the problem? To remove the survygenie.com pop-up ads you need to check 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. How about your browser add-ons. Anything in the list that you don’t remember installing?
3. If that didn’t help, you can give FreeFixer a try. FreeFixer is built to assist users when manually tracking down adware and other types of unwanted software. It is a freeware utility that I’ve been working since 2006 and it scans your computer at lots of locations where unwanted software is known to hook into your computer. If you would like to get additional details about a file in FreeFixer’s scan result, you can just click the More Info link for that file and a web page with a VirusTotal report will open up, which can 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 survygenie.com ads? Please post the name of the adware you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.

Thank you!