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

Here is a screen-cap on the thearbitragetrader.com pop-up from my system:

(Sorry for the ridiculous use of watermarks. I have to do it to stop the copy-cats.)

Does this sound like your experience, you most likely have some adware installed on your machine that pops up the thearbitragetrader.com ads. So don’t write angry emails to the website you were browsing, the ads are almost certainly not coming from them, but from the adware on your computer. I’ll do my best to help you remove the thearbitragetrader.com pop-up in this blog post.

Those that have been reading this blog already know this, but here we go: A little while back I dedicated some of my lab computers and deliberately installed some adware programs on them. Since then I have been tracking the behaviour on these machines 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 observed the thearbitragetrader.com pop-up on one of these lab computers.

www.thearbitragetrader.com resolves to the 198.232.124.192 IP address and thearbitragetrader.com to 54.72.139.26. thearbitragetrader.com was registered on 2014-10-14.

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

If you are wonder if there are many others out there also getting the thearbitragetrader.com ads, the answer is probably yes. Check out the traffic rank from Alexa:

The issue with pop-ups such as this one is that it can be popped up by many variants of adware. 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 thearbitragetrader.com pop-up ads you need to check your system for adware or other types of unwanted software and uninstall it. Here’s my suggested removal procedure:

1. Check what programs you have installed in the Add/Remove programs dialog in the Windows Control Panel. Do you see something that you don’t remember installing 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 something that you don’t remember installing?
3. If that didn’t 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 you find any adware on your machine? Did that stop the thearbitragetrader.com ads? Please post the name of the adware you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.

Thank you!