How to remove Dolars.xyz pop-ups? — Fix Guide

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Dolars.xyz pop-ups appear when you do not expect, distracting and irritating you. However, that is slightly more than annoying pop-ups – their origins is clearly malignant, and they may install other malicious stuff to your PC. In this post, I will show you the guide how to remove Dolars.xyz pop-ups and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any interaction with Dolars.xyz pop-ups will be ineffective at best. In worst case scenario, the sites it can open can introduce malware to your system. These pop-up advertisements may also advertise fake online shopping websites which will take your money and payment info. The latter generally ends up with losing all the money you have on the exposed card.

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What are Dolars.xyz 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 ads and Dolars.xyz pop-ups is the malicious origins of the latter. Normal push notifications are offered for you to enable with a understandable purpose – keep you aware about the new posts, goods for sale and so on. It is an effective approach to help your site to keep visitor’s attention and help the interested visitors to have the best deal.

Short summary of the Dolars.xyz pop-up ads:
NameDolars.xyz
HostingAS14061 DigitalOcean, LLC
United States, North Bergen
IP Address157.230.4.182
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorPowerpcfact, Nancontrast, Overheatusa
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

Dolars.xyz pop-up notifications, as opposed, are related to less legit websites. You will generally see the proposition to enable them after a redirection from another page. There’s nothing bad in redirecting unless it throws you into such a dubious place. At that point, turning on pop-up ads is served under the guise of the anti-DDoS check. Alternatively, the sites can deny showing you the content unless you apply these pop-ups. These theses should raise suspicion, as sites commonly feature a less obscure anti-bot mechanism. Witnessing such an offer is a reason to skip the website doubtlessly. In some cases, even after clicking “Allow”, you will not see the website – it has only a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-up ads.

Dolars.xyz push notification

Dolars.xyz push notification.

How does it work?

Most of browsers support turning on pop-ups from sites. Sites, on the other hand, can send notifications with the content they like. It can be an advertisement of the product listed for sale on this particular website, or an ad of their partner page. As a result, you may see the push notification from site X, but opening it will throw you to site Y – because a link to the latter was embedded.

Cybercriminals bear on this ability in their attempt to earn money using illegal advertising. They trick victims into allowing them to show the banners, and then just spread hundreds of ads of anyone they contract with. As you may suppose, no image-caring organisations will have a business with fraudsters. All the Dolars.xyz push ads you may see lead to other untrustworthy sites. In some cases, the same victim may be trapped by several pop-up spamming websites, and its web browser will turn into a complete mess.

The banners these criminals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It generally provides a negligible payment for one view, but when you can send ads to a huge number of victims and show them hundreds of ads each day – that is a way bigger sum. Even though the majority of such banners giving no result at all, it may still give all the participants a lot of money.

Are Dolars.xyz pop-up advertisements dangerous?

Yes, they are. Initially, they may look non-threatening – just a blinking pop-up that appears a couple times in an hour. However, the contents of this window differ drastically from what you used to see in pop-up ads. Dolars.xyz site is controlled by crooks, who intentionally spread hundreds and thousands of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also don’t follow any manners of advertising and can launch sporadic push notifications into a storm of banners. For weak systems, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But that is not all problems these pop-up notifications carry.

Why people dislike popups

As any other thing related to illegal ads, Dolars.xyz pop-up advertisements don’t have legit offers. Even though hackers make the banners similar to ones from Walmart or Amazon, the web page these ads will throw you to are completely different. And these pages may 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 ads 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, Dolars.xyz pop-ups are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove Dolars.xyz pop-ups?

Fortunately, Dolars.xyz pop-ups removal is not very complicated. They sit in the browser and cannot conceal themselves among system files. Nonetheless, as I pointed out before, some pop-up notifications can introduce malware to your computer. It is nearly impossible to describe all cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is inconvenient. Thus, after disabling the push notifications the best option is to use anti-malware software. I’d especially recommend that if you have never allowed pop-up ads, and they still appeared. This situation may be a sign of adware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will perfectly fit both recovery and malware removal purposes, because of its system recovery functionality and superb detection system.

First and foremost, you should reset your browser settings. You can do that in manual or automated way. The former, obviously, requires 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.

Tools tab in GridinSoft Anti-Malware

You can 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.

Reset Browser Settings tab in GridinSoft Anti-Malware

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. Reseting the Edge browser

  3. 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. The first step to revert Mozilla Firefox

  3. In the next screen, find the “Refresh Firefox” option:
  4. The second step of Firefox restoration
    After choosing this option, you will see the next message:
    The last step for Firefox
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 web page you need. Create a text file titled “hosts” on your pc’s desktop, then open it and fill it with the following lines2:


# Copyright (c) 1993-2006 Microsoft Corp.
#
# This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows.
#
# This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each
# entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should
# be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name.
# The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one
# space.
#
# Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on individual
# lines or following the machine name denoted by a '#' symbol.
#
# For example:
#
# 102.54.94.97 rhino.acme.com # source server
# 38.25.63.10 x.acme.com # x client host
# localhost name resolution is handle within DNS itself.
# 127.0.0.1 localhost
# ::1 localhost

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 Dolars.xyz 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.

GridinSoft Anti-Malware during the scan 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).

GridinSoft scan finished

How to Remove Dolars.xyz Pop-ups?

Name: Dolars.xyz

Description: Dolars.xyz - a lot of users became a target for the pop-up advertisements. I have a lot of friends who literally bombed me with the questions like “how to remove Dolars.xyz push notifications?” or “why do Dolars.xyz pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Dolars.xyz pop-ups, which may corrupt your browser’s correct performance, and create a lot of troubles while you are working.

Operating System: Windows

Application Category: Adware

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References

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

About the author

Wilbur Woodham

I was a technical writer from early in my career, and consider IT Security one of my foundational skills. I’m sharing my experience here, and I hope you find it useful.

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