PAPERWALL: Chinese Websites Posing as Local News Outlets Target Global Audiences with Pro-Beijing Content

This report exposes PAPERWALL, a large network of anonymous websites (123 domains targeting audiences in ~30 countries) that pose as local news outlets to publish scraped local news, commercial press releases (notably cryptocurrency-related), and occasional pro-Beijing political content; it links the operation to Chinese PR firm Haimai via shared Google AdSense IDs and DNS/infrastructure overlaps, highlights reliance on Times Newswire as a content source and ephemeral deletion of political posts to evade detection, and concludes the campaign currently has negligible measured impact but represents a meaningful risk of inadvertent amplification and targeted reputational harm.