Help! My Android tablet keeps showing me ads every two minutes!

Hungerdunger

I've just got back from a week's holiday in the Canary Islands. A day or two after I got there my tablet (Lenovo Yoga 2) starting behaving oddly. Every two minutes or so a full page ad would open up and I'd have to close it down to continue with what I was doing. Some of the ads were for things like the iPhone 7 or Big Fish Casino, while others looked as if they were trying to direct me to !!!!!! sites, or told me I was a competition winner or told me my tablet had viruses and "tap here to continue". Occasionally Google Play Store would also open with the pages for certain apps including Uber and Archery King. Many of the sites were in Spanish, but now I'm back in Blighty they are all in English and more tailored to the British market.

I don't know why this is happening, although I suspect that when I used a couple of Wifi points (one at the airport and a couple in hotels ) I may have unwittingly accepted Ts & Cs without reading them and may have signed up to these ads.

I have done a Google search, but can't find anything which matches what is happening here. I have downloaded an app called 360 Security which didn't find anything suspicious. I guess I could do a factory reset, but as I have nearly 100 apps installed I'd like to keep this as a last resort, and in any case I don't know if that would eradicate the problem.

I wonder if anyone has experienced something similar. If so, any ideas how I can work out where the adverts are coming from and put a stop to them?

[Deleted User]

Try running something like Avast. 360 security is a bit rubbish.

forgotmyname

Use a different browser.

Browntoa

Install and run

https://www.malwarebytes.com/mobile/

GunJack

mbam will find stuff but be unable to remove it - I have the same thing on an android tablet... only way to stop it seems to be to wipe it and re-flash, but I have a generic one with no known ROMs to do so.... kids and downloading allsorts :mad:

ARandomMiser

Delete all your history, cookies, cache and hopefully it will go.

Hungerdunger

Thanks to everyone for all the suggestions.

I went to Malwarebytes first (I use it on my PC, but hadn't thought there might be an android version). It found one piece of malware which I deleted, and I haven't had any adverts pop up for over half an hour, so (touch wood) it seems to have found the problem.

Hilssaut

if it still doesn't work, you should uninstall some recent installed apps and clear cache.