Do you see pop-up surveys from gov-surveys.com while browsing sites that generally don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to circumvent the built-in pop-up blockers in Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari.

Here’s how the gov-surveys.com pop-up survey looked like when I got it on my machine yesterday. I’ve framed some of the interesting properties of the screenshot.

Does this sounds like your story, you apparently have some adware installed on your machine that pop up the gov-surveys.com surveys. So don’t send angry emails to the website you were browsing, the ads are presumably not coming from them, but from the adware on your system. I’ll try help you to remove the gov-surveys.com in this blog post.

Generally this type of survey tries to make the impression that it came from the web site you where browsing, that you will get some sort of compensation for completing the survey, that your feedback will be used to improve the web site. More often that not, the survey is also translated into you language, often poorly translated. Since I own the www.freefixer.com web site, I know the survey is fake.

For those that are new to the blog: A little while back I dedicated some of my lab machines and intentionally installed some adware programs on them. Since then I have been following the actions 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 machines. I first noticed the gov-surveys.com pop-up survey on one of these lab machines.

So, how do you remove the gov-surveys.com pop-up survey ads? On the machine where I got the gov-surveys.com ads I had PriceHorse, SaferSurf and CheckMeUp installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the gov-surveys.com pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in Firefox. Sorry, I don’t know which of them was responsible for the pop-up.

Judging from Alexa’s traffic rank, gov-surveys.com is getting quite a lot of traffic. From the diagram, we can see that the traffic started booming in the middle of October.

The gov-surveys.com domain was also registered in the middle of October 2014. It’s hosted on 209.126.106.182 which appears to be a dedicated server.

The issue with this type of pop-up survey is that it can probably be launched 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 gov-surveys.com ads removal:

The first thing I would do to remove the gov-surveys.com pop-ups is to examine the software installed on the machine, by opening the “Uninstall programs” dialog. You can reach 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 dubious in 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 seeing the gov-surveys.com pop-ups.

I think you will be able to find 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 many years ago. It’s a tool designed to manually track down and remove 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 crippled 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 problems determining if a file is safe or malware in FreeFixer’s scan report, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up your web browser with a page which contains additional information about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be quite useful:

Are you a Mac or Linux user and get the gov-surveys.com pop-ups? What did you do to stop the pop-up in your browser? Please share in the comments below. Thank you!

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

Thank you!