How to remove Prizedidodeball pop-ups? — Fix Guide

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Prizedidodeball pop-ups appear when you do not expect, disturbing and irritating you. However, that is much more than simple pop-up ads – their essence is cleanly malignant, and they may introduce other malware to your computer. In this post, I will guide you on how to remove Prizedidodeball push notifications and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any interaction with Prizedidodeball pop-up advertisements will be ineffective at best. At worst, the websites it can show you can introduce malware to your system. These pop-up notifications 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 Prizedidodeball pop-ups?

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 Prizedidodeball notifications is the malignant origins of the latter. Normal pop-up ads are offered for you to enable on different sites with a understandable purpose – notify you about the latest publications, goods for sale and so on. It is a useful tool to help your website to keep visitors and help the interested users to have the best deal.

Brief summary of the Prizedidodeball.com pop-up ads:
NamePrizedidodeball.com
HostingAS13335 Cloudflare, Inc.
United States, San Francisco
IP Address104.21.11.155
Malware typeAdware1
EffectUnwanted pop-up advertisements
Hazard levelMedium
Malware sourceApps from third-party websites, ads on dubious websites
Similar behaviorScotennepruse, Notify, Riving
Removal method
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

Prizedidodeball pop-up notifications, on the other hand, have a deal with untrustworthy sites. You will commonly observe the offer to enable them after a redirection from another site. There’s nothing bad in redirecting unless it throws you to such a dubious place. At that point, turning on pop-up advertisements is served under the guise of the anti-bot check. In other cases, the sites can refuse to show you the content unless you enable these pop-up ads. These demands should raise suspicion, as websites usually have a less obscure anti-bot mechanism. Spectating this offer should be the reason to skip the page doubtlessly. Sometimes, even when you click “Allow”, you will not get to the web page – it has only a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-ups.

Prizedidodeball push notification

Prizedidodeball push notification.

How does this work?

The majority of web browsers support turning on push notifications from websites. Websites, on the other hand, may send notifications with the content they want. It may be a promotion of the page listed on this site, as well as a promotion of their partner page. As a result, you may see the pop-up from site X, but clicking it will direct you to website Y – because a link to that website was built in.

Crooks bear on this ability in their attempt to earn money using illegal advertising. They trick users into turning on pop-ups, and then just spread hundreds of ads of other crooks they contract with. As you may suppose, no image-caring companies will have a business with fraudsters. All the Prizedidodeball notifications you can see lead to other untrustworthy sites. At some point, the same user may get into a trap of multiple pop-up spamming websites, and its web browser will turn into a complete mess.

The ads these rascals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It commonly provides a miserable payment for one view, but when you have a huge number of victims and show them hundreds of ads every day – that is a much more significant sum. Even though most of these ads giving no result at all, it may still give all the participants a lot of money.

Are Prizedidodeball pop-ups dangerous?

Yes, they are. At the surface, they can look safe – just a colourful pop-up that appears a couple times in an hour. However, the things this window promotes differ sharply from what you used to see in pop-up ads. Prizedidodeball.com web page is ruled by fraudsters, who intentionally throw hundreds of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also never follow any common sense and can launch sporadic pop-up advertisements into a storm of ads. For weak systems, that may be enough to cause performance issues. But troubles are not over at this point.

Why people dislike popups

As with any other thing that touches illegal ads, Prizedidodeball push notifications do not contain any legit deals to offer. Even though crooks make the banners similar to ones from Walmart or Amazon, the web page these banners 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-ups 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, Prizedidodeball pop-up ads are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove Prizedidodeball pop-ups?

Fortunately, Prizedidodeball pop-up notifications removal is not very complicated. They sit in the browser and cannot conceal themselves on a disk. Nevertheless, as I told above, some push notifications can promote malicious software to your system. It is hard to describe all cases, and manual attempts to remove malware is a poor idea. Therefore, after getting rid of the pop-ups it is recommended to use anti-malware software. I’d especially recommend that in the case when you have never clicked “Allow” to pop-up advertisements, and they still appeared. This situation can point at malicious software activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will be the best both system recovery and malware checkup purposes, thanks to its system recovery functionality and multi-layer detection system.

First of all, 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 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.

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 website 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 Prizedidodeball 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 Prizedidodeball Pop-ups?

Name: Prizedidodeball

Description: Prizedidodeball - 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 Prizedidodeball.com push notifications?” or “why do Prizedidodeball.com pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Prizedidodeball 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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