Does this sound familiar? You see pop-up ads from vgsgaming-ads.com while browsing at web sites that usually 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 vgsgaming-ads.com pop-ups turn up when clicking search results from the Google search engine? Or does the pop-ups appear even when you’re not browsing?

Here is how the vgsgaming-ads.com ad looked like on my machine:

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

I found the vgsgaming-ads.com pop-up on one of the lab systems 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 anything new has appeared, such as pop-up windows, new tabs in the browsers, injected ads on website that usually don’t show ads, or if some new files have been saved to the hard-drive.

vgsgaming-ads.com resolves to the 212.47.193.130 IP address and s.vgsgaming-ads.com to 195.93.85.132. The domain was created back in September 2013. adnvm.com and  adslidango.com also resolves to the same IP.

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

It seems as vgsgaming-ads.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 initiated by many variants of adware, not just the adware running 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 vgsgaming-ads.com pop-up ads you need to review 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. You can also examine the browser add-ons. Same thing here, do you see something 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 machine. 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 on how to remove the pop-ups with FreeFixer:

Did you find any adware on your machine? Did that stop the vgsgaming-ads.com ads? Please post the name of the adware you uninstalled from your machine in the comment below.

Thank you!