Does this sound like your story? You see pop-up ads from trackvoluum.com while browsing web sites that generally don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to evade the built-in pop-up blockers in Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Maybe the trackvoluum.com pop-ups appear when clicking search results from the Google search engine? Or does the pop-ups appear even when you’re not browsing?
Here’s a screen capture of the trackvoluum.com pop-up ad when it showed up on my computer:
If you also see this on your system, you apparently have some adware installed on your computer that pops up the trackvoluum.com ads. Contacting the site owner would be a waste of time. The advertisements are not coming from them. I’ll try help you with the trackvoluum.com removal in this blog post.
Those that have been spending some time on this blog already know this, but for new visitors: Some time ago I dedicated a few of my lab computers and deliberately installed a few adware programs on them. Since then I’ve been monitoring 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 updates itself, or if it downloads and installs additional unwanted software on the computers. I first spotted the trackvoluum.com pop-up on one of these lab machines.
trackvoluum.com was created on 2013-06-28.
So, how do you remove the trackvoluum.com pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the trackvoluum.com ads I had TinyWallet, BrowserWarden and BlockAndSurf installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the trackvoluum.com pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in Mozilla Firefox.
It seems as trackvoluum.com is getting quite a lot of traffic, based on Alexa’s traffic rank:
The issue with pop-ups like this one is that it can be launched by many variants of adware, not just the adware that’s installed on my machine. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups.
Anyway, here’s my suggestion for the trackvoluum.com ads removal:
The first thing I would do to remove the trackvoluum.com pop-ups is to examine the software installed on the machine, by opening the “Uninstall programs” dialog. You can find this dialog from the Windows Control Panel. If you are using one of the more recent versions of Windows OS 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 listed there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if some program was installed approximately about the same time as you started seeing the trackvoluum.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? Anything that you don’t remember installing?
I think you will be able to find and remove 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 designed to manually identify 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 will not require you to pay a fee just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.
And if you’re having difficulties figuring out if a file is clean or adware in FreeFixer’s scan result, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up your browser with a page which contains more information about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be very useful:
Here you can see FreeFixer in action removing the adware that caused pop-up ads:
Did you find any adware on your machine? Did that stop the trackvoluum.com ads? Please post the name of the adware you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.
Thank you!