Sound familiar? You see pop-up advertisements from ani.coupyear.com while browsing 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. Perhaps the ani.coupyear.com pop-ups show up when clicking search results from Google? Or does the pop-ups appear even when you’re not browsing?

Here is a screenshot on the ani.coupyear.com pop-up from my computer:

Does this sound like what you see your machine, you presumably have some adware installed on your system that pops up the ani.coupyear.com ads. So there’s no idea contacting the owner of the website you currently were browsing. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll do my best to help you with the ani.coupyear.com removal in this blog post.

Those that have been visiting this blog already know this, but for new visitors: A little while back I dedicated a few of my lab machines and intentionally installed some adware programs on them. Since then I have 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 automatically, or if it downloads additional unwanted software on the machines. I first noticed the ani.coupyear.com pop-up on one of these lab computers.

ani.coupyear.com resolves to 208.43.241.243.

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

BlockAndSurf was the adware that caused the pop-ups in my case.

The problem with pop-ups like this one is that it can be popped up by many variants of adware, not just the adware on my machine. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the pop-ups.

So, what can be done? To remove the ani.coupyear.com pop-up ads you need to review your computer for adware or other types of unwanted software and uninstall it. Here’s my suggested removal procedure:

The first thing I would do to remove the ani.coupyear.com pop-ups is to examine the programs 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 Operating System 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 getting the ani.coupyear.com pop-ups.

The next thing to check would be your browser’s add-ons. Adware often show up under the add-ons dialog in Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Is there anything that looks suspicious? Anything that you don’t remember installing?

I think you will be able to identify 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’ve developed since 2006. It’s a tool designed to manually find and remove unwanted software. When you’ve identified 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 for the program just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

And if you’re having a mess figuring out if a file is safe or adware in the FreeFixer scan result, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up your web browser with a page which contains more details about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be very useful:

Here’s a video tutorial showing FreeFixer in action removing the ani.coupyear.com pop-up ads:

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

Thank you!