AI-Driven Pushpaganda Scam Exploits Google Discover to Spread Scareware and Ad Fraud

Researchers uncovered 'Pushpaganda', an ad-fraud campaign that leverages search engine poisoning and AI-generated content to place deceptive stories in Google Discover and trick users into enabling persistent browser notifications; those notifications deliver scareware, deepfake content, and redirects to sites that generate illicit ad revenue. The operation produced roughly 240 million bid requests from 113 domains in a seven-day period and has spread beyond India to multiple countries. The report also highlights a larger monetization ecosystem (Low5) of over 3,000 domains and 63 Android apps used as cashout sites that at peak generated billions of daily bid requests, demonstrating a resilient, multi-actor laundering infrastructure that complicates takedown and detection.