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

Researchers uncover an AI-powered ad fraud campaign called Pushpaganda that exploits Google Discover to distribute scareware and financial scams through push notifications. The scheme uses AI-generated content and SEO poisoning to trick users into enabling push notifications on Android and Chrome devices. At its peak, 240 million bid requests were generated from 113 domains in a seven-day period, targeting regions including India, U.S., Australia, Canada, South Africa, and U.K. Users are deceived by fake legal threat notifications that redirect to attacker-controlled sites, generating organic traffic to embedded ads and illicit revenue. Related discovery of the Low5 operation revealed 3,000+ domains and 63 Android apps conducting ad fraud, peaking at 2 billion bid requests daily, utilizing a shared monetization infrastructure that complicates attribution.

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