UKH

So, my son has been taking my phone all the time and has downloaded loads of innocent games with my permission. Now, the last couple of weeks I don't know what has happened, but every few minutes I get adverts - the most common is to buy a subscription to some football TV/news  service...I can't get rid of it, it is very annoying and I need my phone for work (and  I really do not want a monthly football subscription service). There are also adverts for toys etc, but you can't seem to get rid of it finally, I always choose, "No thanks" and "go away etc". I have no idea what it is, but my son must have activated something....HELP, I will be eternally grateful.

To be precise, they are not adverts popping up in apps or so, they pop up every time you want to use the phone, switch it on or text somebody or anything else. It is very prohibitive for using the phone

What OS is your phone? Android or Apple? Assuming Android, as I know nothing about Apple.

Assuming he's only downloaded legitimate apps and nothing malicious, you should be able to uninstall everything you don't need and/or block notifications.

You might be able to find the app that is showing the ad by long pressing the ad and seeing what options you get. But rather than faff about with this I would just go through the Apps on the phone and remove everything that you don't use. If you still get the ads, start removing the stuff you do use to see if you can track it down. If that fails, factory reset and and start again. It's not too much work if you have it all synced.

Some of these seem to live in the browser. Go into Settings Applications. Uninstal what you don't recognise and Force Quit browser. Clear cache and data from Storage. Restart phone.

I had this recently, it was all in website permissions within chrome. 

I got rid by going through all the websites I didn't recognise and clearing and resetting. Find here...

Settings > site settings > all sites

That fixed it, or it might have been a software update I suppose.

I had previously tried deleting all new apps, installing malware software etc to no effect.

It's Android! Thanks

Thank you I will try that. The sooner I am not asked whether I want to subscribe to a Football streaming service the better

Thanks, I will try that and see what happens...

I can't help directly but hopefully the others will get you there. I do know that it isn't too hard to disable these as my mother had them on her new Android last year, and we got rid of them fairly easily (I don't remember how, I just Googled something and did it), so hopefully this reassures you that it's not too hard!

Generally these things are called 'push notifications.' They are probably designed to be hard to get rid of, but googling for the above term should give a clue.