Thepharmadds Ads Removal Guide — How to Fix It?

Thepharmadds pop-up notifications appear out of the blue, distracting and irritating you. However, that is way more than simple pop-ups – their nature is cleanly malignant, and they may install other malicious stuff to your computer. In this article, I will show you the guide how to remove Thepharmadds push notifications and explain how to avoid them in the future.

Any time you interact with Thepharmadds pop-up advertisements will be useless at best. In worst case scenario, the websites it can throw you to can introduce malware to your system. These pop-up notifications may also promote fake online shopping sites which will take your money and payment info. The latter generally ends up with losing all the money you have on the exposed card.

It is better to prevent, than repair and repent!

Removing Thepharmadds 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 Thepharmadds 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 Thepharmadds pop-ups is the malicious origins of the latter. Common pop-ups are offered for you to enable with a straightforward purpose – notify you about the latest articles, goods for sale and so on. It is a useful tool to help your site to keep visitor’s attention and help the interested users to have the best price.

Brief description of the Thepharmadds.com pop-ups:

Thepharmadds pop-up ads, in contrast, have a deal with less legit sites. You will generally see the proposition to enable them following the redirection from another site. Redirects are OK unless it throws you to such a questionable place. At that point, turning on pop-up notifications is offered as the anti-bot filtering. Alternatively, the websites may deny showing you the content unless you enable these pop-up notifications. These requirements should raise suspicion, as websites generally have a more convenient anti-bot mechanism. Seeing this requirement should be the reason to leave the page right away. In some cases, even when you click “Allow”, you will not see the website – it has only a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-ups.

Thepharmadds push notification.

How does it work?

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

Cybercriminals rely on this ability in their approach to gain money using illegal advertising. They trick users into allowing the pop-ups, and after that just spread hundreds of banners of other crooks they contract with. As you may suppose, no image-caring organisations will have a deal with fraudsters. All the Thepharmadds popups you can see lead to other fraudulent sites. At some point, the same victim can be trapped by multiple pop-up spamming websites, and its browser will turn into a complete mess.

The banners these crooks show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It usually provides a negligible pay for one view, but when you can send ads to a huge number of users and make it hundreds of times every day – that is a much more significant sum. Despite the majority of such banners are ineffective, it may still give all the participants a lot of money.

Are Thepharmadds push notifications dangerous?

Yes, they are. At the surface, they may look harmless – just a colourful pop-up that appears a couple times in an hour. However, the things this window promotes differ sharply from what you generally see in pop-up notifications. Thepharmadds.com website is controlled by crooks, who intentionally spread tons of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also never follow any common sense and can launch sporadic push notifications into a hurricane of banners. For weak systems, that may be enough to make the system slower. But that is not all problems these pop-up ads carry.

As with any other thing related to illegal ads, Thepharmadds pop-up advertisements lack legit offers. Even though crooks make the banners looking similar to ones from Amazon, Walmart or Ebay, the site 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-up notifications 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, Thepharmadds pop-ups are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove Thepharmadds pop-ups?

Fortunately, Thepharmadds push notifications removal is not very complicated. They sit in the browser and can’t conceal themselves among system files. Nevertheless, as I pointed out before, some pop-up notifications can promote malicious software to your computer. It is hard to predict all of the cases, and manual malware removal is a poor idea. Therefore, after disabling the pop-up ads it is recommended to use anti-malware software. I’d especially recommend that in the case when you have never allowed push notifications, but they still appeared. That can be a sign of adware activity. GridinSoft Anti-Malware will be the best both recovery and malware checkup purposes, because of its system recovery functionality and multi-layer detection system.

First and foremost, you should reset your browser settings. It is possible to do 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.

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.

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 site 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 Thepharmadds 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).

How to Remove Thepharmadds Pop-ups?

Name: Thepharmadds

Description: Thepharmadds - 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 Thepharmadds.com push notifications?” or “why do Thepharmadds.com pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Thepharmadds 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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1. More about this malware type on GridinSoft Encyclopedia.
2. Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.