Fast2captcha.com Pop-Up Ads - How to remove

Fast2captcha.com is a little website that sends ads to the browsers of those who subscribed to its notifications. It tricks people into believing that they must subscribe to its notifications in order to continue browsing the web.

Once Fast2captcha.com gets access to a web browser, it starts showing ads in that browser. Some of these ads are ordinary, but others lead to scam articles, fake and misleading advertisements, and malware.

Fast2captcha.com in short:

Threat type	Adware, bowser hijacker.
How Fast2captcha.com hijacks browsers	It is advertised online, it misleads visitors in order to get them to subscribe to its notifications.
Ad hijacking symptoms	Pop-up ads labeled with “Fast2captcha.com” appear on your screen.
How to stop Fast2captcha.com ads	Disable unwanted notifications, remove all malware with antivirus scanners (Spyhunter for PC, Combo Cleaner for Mac, others).

How Fast2captcha.com works

It hijacks notifications

Fast2captcha.com is a little website that shows up in pop-up ads on various websites: free movie streaming sites and torrenting sites like Soap2day, as well as monetized URL shorteners like Adf.ly. Such sites might open Fast2captcha.com and similar pages in your browser so unexpectedly that you might not realize that they’re ads. They just open, asking you to press the “Allow” button.

Fast2captcha.com shows an illustration and a request to “confirm that you are not a robot”, or another similar text. They even play an audio track with this message. They also show a notification prompt next to the message, in the upper left on Desktop or the top or bottom of your screen on mobile.

When Fast2captcha.com tells you that you must confirm that you are not a robot, it is lying. It’s pretending to be a captcha, a procedure to check whether you’re a robot. Captchas are used by websites to curb automated visitors and often ask you to solve a task like recognizing images. It’s pretty normal to encounter a captcha when browsing the web. So, even though Fast2captcha.com is lying, that lie is not obvious.

Following Fast2captcha.com’s instructions to click the “Allow” button on this notification prompt enables the Fast2captcha.com website to send messages to your browser. Unfortunately, it only sends advertisements. These ads show up as pop-ups in the corner of your screen on desktop or the top of your screen on mobile.

There are plenty of similar sites that are advertised online and try to get people to subscribe to their notifications: SearchConverterInc, ResearchConverter, Ffypretailo.top, etc.

It shows unwanted ads

Once Fast2captcha.com can show you notifications, it might display little pop-up messages with links to various promoted websites. These pop-ups have the site name “Fast2captcha.com” on them. That’s just what notifications look like. Notifications can be very useful (Web Push API Notifications best practices). But many websites just use them to deliver ads.

Some of the pop-up ads are harmless because they lead to mundane, safe websites, such as your local online stores. But there are also ads that are dangerous:

• Ads made to look like social media notifications. No matter where they lead, disguising ads like this is very shady.
• Fake virus warnings. They lead to sites like Highsecureus.com which promote various random applications.
• Ads for browser utilities that end up being browser hijackers.
• Scam articles promoting various get-rich-quick schemes.

Fast2captcha.com might show controversial but not unsafe content, like gambling platforms and explicit adult content. But other content is truly unsafe, such as misleading ads promoting counterfeit products, shady health supplements, and various scams that promise to make you rich.

Not to mention that Fast2captcha.com might lead to various malware infections such as miners, spyware, and others. It’s advisable to check your recently downloaded files and installed programs to see whether Fast2captcha.com caused any such infections to infiltrate your device.

How to stop Fast2captcha.com ads

Block unwanted notifications

So, Fast2captcha.com gets access to browsers by tricking people into subscribing to its notifications. How to undo this and stop Fast2captcha.com from sending you unwanted pop-up ads?

All you need to do is manage your notification settings:

• Chrome – open Settings, scroll down to Site settings (under Privacy and security), click on Notifications.
• Edge (Chromium) – open Settings, click Site Permissions, Notifications.
• Firefox – open Settings, Privacy & Security, scroll down to Permissions, and click on Settings next to Notifications.
• Safari – in the Safari menu, choose Preferences, Websites, Notifications.

Once you open the notification settings page, you can see all the websites that are allowed to send messages to your browser. You can also see all the sites that you’ve blocked from sending notifications.

Don’t worry if you see some unfamiliar sites. It’s easy to allow and block sites accidentally. Go through your list and block or allow sites as you want.

Check for malware

Knowing that Fast2captcha.com shows some potentially unsafe ads – ads that sometimes lead to scams, malware, etc. – it’s important to check your device for dangerous or unwanted programs and processes. Use antivirus scanners such as Spyhunter for Windows, Combo Cleaner for macOS, and others. Manually review your browser add-ons and programs that were installed recently and remove those that are suspicious.

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