Lucky-gifts-center.com Redirects - How to remove

Lucky-gifts-center.com (or Vip.lucky-gifts-center.com) is a malicious website full of scam pages that tell you that you’re one of 100 lucky prize winners and to answer nine questions to get your gift. To appear more legitimate, Lucky-gifts-center.com shows you it knows your device, your location, and your internet provider. So far, it seems like Lucky-gifts-center.com is most popular on iOS and Mac OS. The causes of the redirects could include a compromised advertising network and a common adware infection.

In short about Lucky-gifts-center.com redirects and pop-ups:

Type of threat	Scam, phishing.
Causes of the pop-ups	Infected sites and ads, adware infection, browser hijackers.
Signs that Lucky-gifts-center.com is a scam	Known scam format (“Congratulations, [browser] user!”, “Congratulations Dear Amazon Customer”, etc.), no contacts or TOS on the site, urgency, a timer, out-of-stock products, comments include stolen photos, you’re required to cover shipping.
How to stop Lucky-gifts-center.com ads	Report malicious ads, contact site administrators, clear site data from your browser, uninstall shady browser extensions, remove malware from your computer (SpyHunter for PC, Combo Cleaner for Mac, etc.).

Lucky-gifts-center.com

In the past few days, people have started seeing Lucky-gifts-center.com redirects. This happens when they click an ad on a legitimate website or when they visit a particular website. The Lucky-gifts-center.com pop-up can be so aggressive that using the browser becomes near impossible.

Lucky-gifts-center.com is obviously a scam. It greets visitors with this line:

Dear [brand] user,

Congratulations! You are one of 100 users that we selected to receive the chance to win an iPhone XS, Samsung Galaxy S9+ or iPad Pro.

and:

Dear [brand] user,

Congratulations! You are one of 100 users that we selected as part of our rewards program. You can win the Samsung Galaxy S9+, iPhone XS or iPad Pro.

Lucky-gifts-center.com has versions in multiple languages. The brands that it spoofs include  Vodafone, Rogers, Bell, Teksavvy, Optus, and a bunch of others. These brands have absolutely nothing to do with Lucky-gifts-center.com.

As is common for scams, this one also has a few fake comments that, unsurprisingly, use stolen photos. There’s no privacy policy or terms of service on the page.

Lucky-gifts-center.com’s goal is to make some money for the scammers, and the ways they can do that include:

• selling your personal information (name, credit card number, etc.),
• signing you up for fraudulent or grossly overpriced subscription services,
• adding you to reward programs that trick you into spending money in hopes of getting prizes.

As long as you recognize that Lucky-gifts-center.com is a malicious website and ignore it, you’re fine. Just close the site and do not reveal to it any information about yourself.

What’s causing Lucky-gifts-center.com pop-ups?

The Lucky-gifts-center.com redirects appear only to some users, but they show up on multiple websites, including trusted sites that carefully review their ads for malicious code.

It’s totally possible that a group of malicious actors has infiltrated a trusted ad-network and triggered a malware attack by replacing innocent and safe ads with links to Lucky-gifts-center.com. This would explain why the redirects appear on multiple websites. Ad-networks are intermediaries between advertisers and publishers and they work with multiple websites. A compromised ad could then spread all over the web. Until the advertising network shuts it down.

Your computer or phone need not be infected with anything for Lucky-gifts-center.com to stalk you. Lucky-gifts-center.com may know your location, ISP, and other information, but these things are accessible to any website and do not mean that there’s an infection on your computer, so don’t worry too much.

But it is also possible that there is adware on your computer. Some adware infections replace or inject ads into your browser – quite seamlessly, you might not even know that anything is wrong – and some of those ads are malicious.

Yes, even Macs are vulnerable to this. According to Kaspersky, up to 30% of their Mac detections are for the Shlayer trojan, a piece of malware that hijacks your web traffic and installs adware on your Mac. Likely, those infected with the Shlayer trojan also have apps like ManagementMark, TechLetterSearch, ReachChoice, and similar boring-named green-and-white icon apps. By the way, Shlayer spreads with fake software updates.

So, it could go either way: your device might be infected with adware, or it was advertising networks that got infected.

How to deal with Lucky-gifts-center.com pop-ups

The Lucky-gifts-center.com ads may make it difficult for you to use a particular website.

To troubleshoot, try these things:

• Visit different websites. If Lucky-gifts-center.com doesn’t show up, maybe only a particular site was compromised.
• Use another browser or use the Incognito/Private mode. If that helps, browser data or a bad browser extension may be responsible.
• Visit the site using a different device. If that helps, your device may be infected.

Remember that you can report malicious ads. Hit the report button on any ad that opens Lucky-gifts-center.com. If it’s a particular site that’s been infected, email them and tell them about the problem so that they can bad Lucky-gifts-center.com ads.

I’ve included some instructions below for clearing browser data – that might help and it’s the least drastic thing you can do when trying to get rid of a persistent redirect. Also, if Lucky-gifts-center.com is spamming notification pop-ups, block notifications in your browser. You can block Lucky-gifts-center.com individually.

Adware can come in the form of browser extensions, which are generally disabled if you use the Incognito mode to browse (usually opened with the Cmd+Shift+N keyboard shortcut). A way to detect a malicious browser extension is to disable all of them and then enable them one-by-one till you see which one causes trouble, then remove it.

But removing malicious extensions might not be easy, as some of them are rooted in malicious scripts and settings on your computer and they return every time you delete them. In this case, you either need to find their files and delete those from system folders or scan your computer with an anti-malware program to find those files for you.

Some good anti-malware programs are SpyHunter for Windows, Combo Cleaner for Mac OS, but if they don’t detect anything and you know there’s an infection, you may need something stronger. And make sure that your antivirus program has the newest updates installed.

Automatic Malware removal tools

How to remove Lucky-gifts-center.com Redirects from Safari:Top

Remove malicious extensions

• Click on Safari menu on the top left corner of the screen. Select Preferences.
  
• Select Extensions and uninstall Lucky-gifts-center.com Redirects and other suspicious extensions.
  
• If your homepage was changed, click on Safari menu on the top left corner of the screen. Select Preferences and choose General tab. Enter preferable URL to the homepage field.
  

(Optional) Reset your browser’s settings(older versions) If you are still experiencing any issues related to Lucky-gifts-center.com, reset the settings of your browser to its default settings.

• Click on Safari menu on the top left corner of the screen. Select Reset Safari…
  
• Select which options you want to reset (usually all of them come preselected) and click on the Reset button.
  

If you cannot reset your browser settings and the problem persists, scan your system with an anti-malware program.

TopHow To remove Lucky-gifts-center.com Redirects from Google Chrome:

• Click on the 3 horizontal lines icon on a browser toolbar and Select More Tools→Extensions
  
• Select all malicious extensions and delete them.
  
• Click on the 3 horizontal lines icon on a browser toolbar and Select Settings
  
• Select Manage Search engines
  
• Remove unnecessary search engines from the list
  
• Go back to settings. On Startup choose Open blank page (you can remove undesired pages from the set pages link too).
• If your homepage was changed, click on Chrome menu on the top right corner, select Settings. Select Open a specific page or set of pages and click on Set pages.
  
• Delete malicious search websites at a new Startup pages window by clicking “X” next to them.
  

(Optional) Reset your browser’s settings

If you are still experiencing any issues related to Lucky-gifts-center.com Redirects, reset the settings of your browser to its default settings.

• Click on a Chrome’s menu button (three horizontal lines) and select Settings.
• Scroll to the end of the page and click on theReset browser settings button.
  
• Click on the Reset button on the confirmation box.
  

If you cannot reset your browser settings and the problem persists, scan your system with an anti-malware program.