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

Here’s how the hotchatdate.com pop-up looked like when I got it on my computer:

Does this sound like your experience, you most likely have some adware installed on your system that pops up the hotchatdate.com ads. So there’s no use contacting the site owner. The advertisements are not coming from them. I’ll try help you to remove the hotchatdate.com pop-ups in this blog post. To do this, we need to remove all the adware from your machine.

I found the hotchatdate.com pop-up on one of the lab machines 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.

hotchatdate.com was registered on 2014-05-05. hotchatdate.com resolves to the 94.199.251.101 IP address and the domain is protected by Domains By Proxy LLC.

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

Judging from Alexa’s traffic rank, hotchatdate.com is getting quite a lot of traffic:

The issue with pop-ups like the one described in this blog post is that it can be initiated by many variants of adware, not just the adware on my computer. 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 hotchatdate.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 review the add-ons you installed in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari. Same thing here, do you see something that you don’t remember installing?
3. If that did not 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 guide showing how to remove pop-up ads with FreeFixer:

Are you a Mac or Linux user and get the hotchatdate.com pop-ups? What did you do to stop the pop-up in your browser? Please share in the comments below. Thanks!

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

Thank you!