Hi robert, please turn off the CAPS LOCK. It makes text hard to read and looks like SHOUTING.

Firefox will keep bringing back the scam page when you crash out of it because of crash recovery.

There are a few common patterns to these annoying pages, and these are some techniques for closing them without having to take drastic measures.

The "key" (ha ha) is the keyboard shortcut for closing the current tab, which is Ctrl+w (or on Mac, Cmd+w). Try it after each action to see whether it is available yet.

(1) Large alert dialog (lots of text)

If you cancel this dialog, it may reappear. After two or three appearances, Firefox should add a checkbox at the bottom of the dialog to stop the site from showing more alerts. Check that box and click OK to block further dialogs.

(2) Authentication dialog (asks for username and password)

If you cancel this dialog, the page may reload and immediately show it again. Pressing the Esc key numerous times in a row can cancel the reload as well as the dialog.

(3) Reacting to mouse movement

Some pages have a script that detects when you are moving the mouse pointer up toward the tab bar and takes action to show another dialog, or moves to full screen view to hide the toolbar area. On these pages, the keyboard shortcut is essential.

Hopefully this will let you close problem pages without having to "kill" Firefox in the Windows Task Manager. (I don't recommend using that method because the tab will come back during automatic crash recovery anyway.)

Any luck?

Often these scam pages are promoted through ad networks. As a defensive measure, you could consider using an add-on that is effective at blocking ads, such as:

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/

As with any content blocker, this will cause problems on some sites, so keep an eye on its toolbar button in case you need to make an exception to get a page to load properly.

If you cannot "escape" the scam page, you may need to bypass crash recovery. If you hide Firefox's session history files, then Firefox will just start up with your home page. It take a couple steps:

(1) Type or paste the following into the Windows Run dialog or the system search box, and press Enter to launch Windows Explorer into this folder:

%APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles

Windows should expand that to show the hidden folder:

C:\Users\your-user-name\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles

There, you should see at least one semi-randomly-named profile folder -- for example, "a23bc4z7.default". (If you see more than one, you'll want to figure out which one has the unwanted session history in it by checking each one.)

Double-click into the profile folder.

(2) Next, rename some things to hide them from Firefox:

• Right-click the sessionstore-backups folder and rename it to sessionstore-backupsOLD (later you can mine the files in this folder for any important tabs you want to restore)

• Check for any files with these names and:
  • sessionstore.jsonlz4 - created by Firefox 56-67 when it shuts down normally - rename to sessionstoreOLD.jsonlz4
  • sessionstore.js - created by Firefox 55 and earlier when it shuts down normally - rename to sessionstoreOLD.js
  • sessionstore.bak - obsolete file from years ago - delete

(3) If you have multiple profile folders, repeat with the other folders.

When you start Firefox up again, it should just show the home page.

Success?

If you need to read the contents of any of those hidden .jsonlz4 files, you can use this tool on my websites to extract out a list of the tabs:

https://www.jeffersonscher.com/ffu/scrounger.html

A way out of a trap page is to (force it if needed) Close Firefox. Wait about 20 seconds for Firefox to finish closing. Right-click on the Firefox icon and select Open New Window. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Sometimes this works. If it opens, close it by Menu > File > Exit. This will flush out that web page from the Session Store.

You can do a malware check with several malware scanning programs on the Windows computer.

• https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/troubleshoot-firefox-issues-caused-malware

Please scan with all programs because each program detects different malware. All these programs have free versions.

Make sure you update each program to get the latest version of their databases before doing a scan.

• Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware:
  https://www.malwarebytes.com/
• AdwCleaner:
  http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/download/adwcleaner/
  http://www.softpedia.com/get/Antivirus/Removal-Tools/AdwCleaner.shtml
• SuperAntispyware:
  http://www.superantispyware.com/
• Microsoft Safety Scanner:
  https://www.microsoft.com/security/scanner/en-us/default.aspx
• Windows Defender:
  https://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/using-defender
• Spybot Search & Destroy:
  http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html
• Kasperky Free Security Scan:
  https://www.kaspersky.com/security-scan

You can also do a check for a rootkit infection with TDSSKiller.

• Anti-rootkit utility TDSSKiller:
  https://support.kaspersky.com/viruses/disinfection/5350

https://support.kaspersky.com/viruses/utility