Remove Captchawave.top (Captcha Wave) Pop-up Ads

Captchawave.top has become a major source of frustration for numerous users who have fallen prey to its relentless pop-up advertisements. I have personally received an influx of inquiries from friends seeking assistance with removing Captchawave.top push notifications or figuring out why these persistent pop-ups continue to plague their Chrome browser, even after installing AdBlock.

In this article, we will guide you through the necessary steps to effectively tackle Captchawave.top pop-ups, which not only hinder the smooth operation of your browser but also pose a significant disruption while you are engrossed in your work.

Captchawave.top employs deceitful methods such as fake error messages and alerts to deceive unsuspecting users into subscribing to its push notifications. Once subscribed, individuals will begin to receive spam pop-ups on their devices, even if their browser is closed.

These intrusive advertisements often promote adult sites, online web games, counterfeit software updates, and undesirable programs. It is crucial to exercise caution and avoid subscribing to Captchawave.top notifications to prevent being bombarded with unwanted and potentially harmful content.

It is better to prevent, than repair and repent!

Removing Captchawave.top manually may take hours and may damage your PC in the process. I recommend you to download GridinSoft Anti-Malware for threats removal. Allows to complete scan and cure your PC during the trial period.

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What are Captchawave.top pop-up advertisements?

As the pop-up definition goes, these are short and small advertisements that attract your attention to a product they promote. But the difference between regular pop-up notifications and Captchawave.top notifications is the malicious origins of the latter. Normal pop-up advertisements are offered for you to enable with a understandable purpose – notify you about the latest posts, discounts and so on. It is a useful tool to help your website to keep visitors and help the interested visitors to have the best deal.

Brief summary of the Captchawave.top pop-up ads:

Captchawave.top pop-up ads, in contrast, are related to untrustworthy websites. You will commonly witness the offer to enable them following the redirection from another page. Redirects are OK unless they throw you into such a dubious place. In this case, turning on pop-up ads is offered under the guise of the anti-DDoS filtering. Alternatively, the sites can deny showing you the content unless you apply these pop-up advertisements. These demands should already raise suspicion, as sites usually feature a less obscure anti-bot mechanism. Spectating this offer is a reason to leave the website doubtlessly. In some cases, even after clicking “Allow”, you will not get to the website – the sole page it has is a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up notifications.

Captchawave.top push notification.

How does this work?

The majority of web browsers support turning on push notifications from websites. Sites, on the other hand, may send out notifications with the content they want. It can be a promotion of the page posted on this site, or a promotion of the page of their partner. As a result, you can see the pop-up from site X, but opening it will direct you to website Y – because a link to that website was added.

Cybercriminals bear on this ability in their attempt to earn money through advertising. They trick users into allowing them to show the banners, and then just spread hundreds of promotions of anyone they have a deal with. As you may suppose, no legit companies will have a deal with fraudsters. All the Captchawave.top notifications you can see lead to other untrustworthy sites. At some point, the same victim may be trapped by multiple pop-up spamming web pages, and its web browser will turn into a complete mess.

The promotions these criminals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It commonly provides a miserable pay for one person, but when you have a huge number of users and make it hundreds of times every day – that is a much bigger sum. Even though the majority of these banners giving no result at all, it may still bring all the parties a lot of profit.

Are Captchawave.top pop-ups dangerous?

Yes, they are. Initially, they can look non-threatening – just a colourful pop-up that appears from time to time. However, the contents of this window differ sharply from what you generally see in pop-ups. Captchawave.top site is ruled by fraudsters, who intendedly spread tons of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also don’t follow any manners of advertising and can launch sporadic pop-up advertisements into a hurricane of promotions. For weak computers, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But that is not all problems these push notifications carry.

As any other thing that touches illegal ads, Captchawave.top pop-up ads lack legit deals to offer. Even though crooks make the banners looking similar to ones from Amazon, Walmart or Ebay, the web page these ads will throw you to are completely different. And these pages can offer you to turn on other pop-ups, install a “useful” program, or pay for a thing at a big discount and never receive it. Let’s leave aside the cases when pop-up advertisements promote phishing pages or straightforward malware. There’s no way these pages will bring you any good, thus interacting with them is a very bad idea. For the same reason, Captchawave.top pop-up notifications are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove Captchawave.top pop-ups?

Fortunately, Captchawave.top pop-up notifications removal is pretty easy. They parasite in the web browser and cannot conceal themselves in the system. Nonetheless, as I told above, some pop-up notifications may introduce malicious software to your system. It is nearly impossible to show all of the cases, and manual malware removal is inconvenient. Therefore, after removing the source of the pop-up ads the best option is to use anti-malware software. I would especially recommend that in the case when you have never clicked “Allow” to pop-up notifications, and they still appeared. That can be a sign of malicious software activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will be the best both recovery and malware removal purposes, because of its system recovery functionality and advanced detection system.

First of all, you should reset your browser settings. It is possible to do in manual or automated way. The former, obviously, takes more time to complete and can be somewhat complicated if you have never done that. Automated supposes the use of anti-malware programs that can reset all browser settings at once.

Reset your browsers with GridinSoft Anti-Malware

To reset your browser with GridinSoft Anti-Malware, open the Tools tab, and click the “Reset browser settings” button.

You may see the list of options for each browser. By default, they are set up in a manner that fits the majority of users. Press the “Reset” button (lower right corner). In a minute your browser will be as good as new.

The browser reset is recommended to perform through the antivirus tool by GridinSoft, because the latter is also able to reset the HOSTS file without any additional commands.

Reset your browsers manually

Manual method of browser reset

To reset Edge, do the following steps:

1. Open “Settings and more” tab in upper right corner, then find here “Settings” button. In the appeared menu, choose “Reset settings” option:

2. After picking the Reset Settings option, you will see the following menu, stating about the settings which will be reverted to original:

For Mozilla Firefox, do the next actions:

1. Open Menu tab (three strips in upper right corner) and click the “Help” button. In the appeared menu choose “troubleshooting information”:

2. In the next screen, find the “Refresh Firefox” option:

After choosing this option, you will see the next message:

If you use Google Chrome

1. Open Settings tab, find the “Advanced” button. In the extended tab choose the “Reset and clean up” button:

2. In the appeared list, click on the “Restore settings to their original defaults”:

3. Finally, you will see the window, where you can see all the settings which will be reset to default:

Opera can be reset in the next way

1. Open Settings menu by pressing the gear icon in the toolbar (left side of the browser window), then click “Advanced” option, and choose “Browser” button in the drop-down list. Scroll down, to the bottom of the settings menu. Find there “Restore settings to their original defaults” option:


2. After clicking the “Restore settings…” button, you will see the window, where all settings, which will be reset, are shown:

When the browsers are reset, you need to ensure that your browser will connect the right DNS while connecting to the website you need. Create a text file titled “hosts” on your pc’s desktop, then open it and fill it with the following lines²:

Find the hosts.txt file in C:/Windows/System32/drivers/etc directory. Rename this file to “hosts.old.txt” (to distinguish it from the new one), and then move the file you created on the desktop to this folder. Remove the hosts.old from this folder. Now you have your hosts file as good as new.

Scan your system for possible viruses

After removing the Captchawave.top push notifications, it’s time to see if these pop-ups brought any threat to your system. Launch GridinSoft Anti-Malware, and then click on Standard scan. It will be enough in most cases to find and remove malware. The scan will last 5-10 minutes; you are free to use your system during that process.

Once the scan is complete, you will see the detections or a notification about a clean system. Proceed with pressing the Clean Up button (or OK when nothing is detected).

1. More about this malware type on GridinSoft Encyclopedia.
2. Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.