Removing helperamc (Advanced Mac Cleaner) OS X

I was working on an OS X system which kept getting annoying pop-ups about the system needing clean up, anti-virus software etc. I was able to see that the window was titled ‘helperamc’.

It turns out this was a remnant from Advanced Mac Cleaner, the use of which I won’t comment on here. The user of the system had tried to remove it when upgrading OS X version, but the annoying advertising component remained.

Killing the process and deleting the application doesn’t work, as it has a daemon to relaunch itself. After some investigation I found the following commands (issued in terminal.app) will sort out this issue and remove helperamc for good:

launchctl unload ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.pcv.hlpramcn.plist
rm ~/Library/Application\ Support/amc/helperamc.app

As they are user files admin access is not needed. You may need to kill the helperamc process between these commands.