Does this sound like what you are seeing right now? You see pop-up ads from captogian.com while browsing on web sites that normally don’t advertise in pop-up windows. The pop-ups manage to get round the built-in pop-up blockers in Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer or Safari. Maybe the captogian.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’s how the captogian.com pop-up looked like when I got it on my machine:

Does this sound like what you see your machine, you probably have some adware installed on your system that pops up the captogian.com ads. Contacting the site owner would be a waste of time. The ads are not coming from them. I’ll try help you to remove the captogian.com pop-ups in this blog post.

If you have been following this blog already know this, but if you are new: A little while back I dedicated a few of my lab machines and deliberately installed a few adware programs on them. I’ve been observing the behaviour on these machines to see what kinds of adverts that are displayed. I’m also looking on other interesting things such as if the adware auto-updates, or if it downloads and installs additional unwanted software on the computers. I first found the captogian.com pop-up on one of these lab machines.

captogian.com was created on 2015-04-06. captogian.com resolves to the 198.41.207.85 address and so does www.captogian.com.

So, how do you remove the captogian.com pop-up ads? On the machine where I got the captogian.com ads I had WebShield, mystartsearch, Wajam, PhaseProfessor, FastSearch, PrimaryColor, SSFK.exe, SFKEX64.exe, YTDownloader and acengine installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the captogian.com pop-ups and all the other ads I was getting in Mozilla Firefox.

The bad news with pop-ups such as this one is that it can be initiated 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 captogian.com ads removal:

The first thing I would do to remove the captogian.com pop-ups is to examine the software installed on the machine, by opening the “Uninstall programs” dialog. You can open this dialog from the Windows Control Panel. If you are using one of the more recent versions of Windows 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 listed 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 observing the captogian.com pop-ups.

Then I would check the browser add-ons. Adware often appear under the add-ons dialog in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari. Is there anything that looks suspicious? Anything that you don’t remember installing?

I think you will be able to track down 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’ve developed since 2006. It’s a tool built to manually identify 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 crippled 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 problems deciding if a file is clean 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 more information about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be very useful:

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

Thank you!