Recently, my computer, specifically, the Chrome Browser got affected by a malware that keeps popping up a Starbucks $100 Voucher Award window which tries to get my personal information (and faking customer traffic to defraud the sponsor, I don’t know which as I didn’t click on it). It has an URL that points to awardr.net. I believe this came from one of my Facebook friends’ entry that I accidentally clicked. From then on, every time I click on the Facebook or some of the URL’s, the Starbucks $100 Voucher Award would pop up to get me to answer some survey questions and perhaps my personal information (as shown below). It was so annoying!

I searched and searched the Google without yielding any solution. Until I decided that I should use one of the Freeware online: Malwarebytes Anti-Malware. It found the potential problem but it didn’t remove the file “expertpdf7_d165399.exe” until I removed it manually. It’s located in my “download” directory as “C:\Users\dtsai\Downloads\expertpdf7_d165399.exe (PUP.BundleOffers.IIQ) ” file. And it’s gone. Is it?

It kept coming back. So I then removed all the Chrome Gadgets, which didn’t help. But it’s good to remove all the useless Chrome Gadgets.

However, it didn’t quite do the trick until I completely uninstalled Google Chrome, restarted the computer, and re-installed Google Chrome when it’s finally gone. I believe it had managed to alter the Chrome software somehow. Very scary!

Just to share my experience in case you ran into the same problem.