AI-Driven Pushpaganda Scam Exploits Google Discover to Spread Scareware and Ad Fraud
Apr 14, 2026
Ad Fraud / Artificial Intelligence
Cybersecurity researchers have unmasked a novel ad fraud scheme that has been found to leverage search engine poisoning (SEO) techniques and artificial intelligence (AI)-generated content to push deceptive news stories into Google's Discover feed and trick users into enabling persistent browser notifications that lead to scareware and financial scams. The campaign, which has been found to target the personalized content feeds of Android and Chrome users, has been codenamed Pushpaganda by HUMAN's Satori Threat Intelligence and Research Team. "This operation, named for push notifications central to the scheme, generates invalid organic traffic from real mobile devices by tricking users into subscribing to enabling notifications that presented alarming messages," researchers Louisa Abel, Vikas Parthasarathy, João Santos, and Adam Sell said in a report shared with The Hacker News. At its peak, about 240 million bid requests have been associated wit...
