Remove CrimeWatch Adware

Hello there and welcome to the FreeFixer blog. I just found another bundled adware titled CrimeWatch and wanted to give you some removal instructions. If the CrimeWatch adware is installed and running on your machine, you will see CrimeWatchService.exe, digitally signed by “Mathematical Applications“, running in the Windows Task Manager. You will also see a new service installed, called CrimeWatch and perhaps also a yellow pop-up allowing you to toggle CrimeWatch on and off. I’ll show how to remove CrimeWatch in this blog post with the FreeFixer removal tool.Crime Watch toggle

CrimeWatch is bundled with a number of downloads. Bundling means that software is included in other software’s installers. Here’s one example how it appears in an installer for an unrelated program.

CrimeWatch installer

As always when I find some new bundled software I uploaded it to VirusTotal to check if the anti-malware software there find anything interesting. 15 of the 56 anti-malware scanners detected the file. The CrimeWatch files are detected as PUA.PullUpdate! by Agnitum, ApplicUnwnt by Comodo, Adware.Yontoo.55 by DrWeb, PUP.Optional.Crimewatch.A by Malwarebytes, Trj/Genetic.gen by Panda and HEUR/QVM30.1.Malware.Gen by Qihoo-360.

CrimeWatch virustotal

Since you probably want to remove CrimeWatch, these are the files you should check for removal if you want to remove it with FreeFixer. A restart of your machine may be required to complete the removal.CrimeWatchService.exe process crimewatch.exe crimewatch.dll files CrimeWatch service

Hope that helped you with the removal.

Did you also find CrimeWatch on your machine? Any idea how it installed? Please let me and the readers know by posting a comments. Thank you!

Hope you found this useful and thanks you for reading.