Russian ad agency influences Europeans

A Russian influence network active in France and Germany during the Covid-19 pandemic was also deployed in the run-up to Romania’s recently cancelled election, according to documents seen by the Financial Times.

AdNow, an online advertising firm founded in 2014 by Russian nationals in Moscow headquarters and with a London affiliate, was used in a campaign to push misinformation about western coronavirus vaccines. The company, now relocated to Bulgaria, in recent years has been active in ad campaigns in Romania and Bulgaria, the documents show. They were first revealed by BG Elves, a Bulgarian cyber security expert group and by Romanian investigative portal Snoop.

“They play with social engineering, try to trigger emotions to force you to click on their misleading ads,” said Petko Petkov from BG Elves, who reviewed the AdNow software and concluded it uses an enhanced profiling operation that collects user information that can be exploited for political goals. “It is very easy for you to be misled. The final goal is to ask for your personal data.”

Romanian authorities earlier this month cancelled the country’s presidential elections over alleged Russian meddling to the benefit of a pro-Putin candidate, Călin Georgescu, who had won the first round of the vote. Social media influencers who promoted Georgescu have been brought in for questioning and one of their sponsors is being investigated for money laundering and illegal campaign financing.

The European Commission has also launched a probe into TikTok’s role in Georgescu’s inexplicable rise to number nine on the platform in the days before the election. TikTok has denied any wrongdoing. Georgescu has denied having any links with Russia or to anyone connected to the social media campaign in his favour.

The documents show that despite several ownership changes, AdNow has connections to Romania’s far-right, pro-Russian circles and played a significant role in preparing the ground for Georgescu’s anti-vaxxer, mystical and ultranationalist messages.

AdNow has functioned as an online advertising agent through which its clients have been able to pepper supporters of Georgescu with ads that generated an estimated €2mn in revenue in the past several years, said Victor Ilie from Snoop. One such product advertised via AdNow was Toxic Off, a pill that claims to eliminate parasites and toxins from the human body with a 100 per cent rate of “general health improvement”.

“AdNow has been here for years delivering ads, health misinformation and financial scams to the public, which prepared them for an abrupt campaign like the one on TikTok,” Ilie said.

“In a country like Romania, with 19mn people, if you see 440mn ads in a month, all of them being for frauds or fake medicine, that can educate people to lose their faith in science, in reason.”

The founder and general director of AdNow LLC between 2014 and 2018 was Yulia Serebryanskaya, a graduate of Novosibirsk State University who worked on the presidential campaigns of Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, and later acted as a communications director for the ruling United Russia party. The company was then transferred to another Russian national.

AdNow LLP, a London affiliate, was incorporated in 2014 and changed addresses multiple times before being dissolved in 2023. It was owned by Russian entrepreneur Stanislav Fesenko. For a few months in 2018 and 2019 it shared the same address with a company that was named Bunelu Ltd at the time. (A company with the same name that is currently registered at a different address in Scotland has no connection with it). The first Bunelu company subsequently moved its operations to Bucharest under the ownership of a businessman linked to Romanian ultranationalists and a frequent visitor of Russia’s embassy in Romania, Mihai Rotariu.

Rotariu has operated several companies under the brand United Thracia, a historical reference to an ancient Balkan kingdom, which seeks to “transform divine energies and express creativity within human beings”, according to its web site. After Snoop revealed Rotariu’s links earlier this month, he was removed from United Thracia’s web site. He did not respond to requests for comment.

“Russian influencers in the region are coming in many layers that are not necessarily related to each other, but they amplify one another,” Ilie said.

AdNow’s Russian operation was also implicated in a massive disinformation campaign in France and Germany during the Covid pandemic to discredit the efficacy of Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines as Russia unveiled its own Sputnik jabs.

The main AdNow operation in Russia was sold last year and is now owned and operated by a Georgian man named Giorgi Abuladze, who set up its headquarters in the Bulgarian city of Plovdiv alongside more than 50 other companies he owns.

A review of data gathered by BG Elves shows a large number of AdNow employees are Russian, and dozens live in Novosibirsk — the birthplace of Serebryansky — as well as other cities across Russia. Some have left since the company was passed on, but many stayed.

Abuladze founded his companies in a short span of time earlier this year and employed hundreds of Russian nationals, according to company records reviewed by the FT.

Abuladze has denied allegations of pushing Russian propaganda. He admitted having bought AdNow from a Russian national but denied being part of a Russian disinformation campaign.

“I have been contacted by Bulgarian investigators, the local equivalent of the FBI, and I gave them all the technical data,” he told the FT. “It’s all bullshit, it is not true. I will make a more detailed statement after the Bulgarian authorities come to their conclusion.”

Fesenko, who moved to Budapest in 2016, told the FT that he no longer had anything to do with the former business, which was set up in London because Russia was already subject to western sanctions after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and international partners were reluctant to do business with Moscow.

But he said the founder, main owner and executive of AdNow was Mikhail Serebryansky, Yulia’s younger brother. Fesenko claimed that during his time at the company, the business had no political agenda.

The anti-vaccine campaign was orchestrated by a company named Fazze, which approached French and German influencers to spread fake news about the US and UK-made jabs. Fazze used AdNow’s email servers and its London address because the owner was “a friend of Mike” who was “too lazy to set up the business properly”, Fesenko said, adding that AdNow otherwise had nothing to do with the campaign.

Fazze was dissolved after the scandal, which was revealed in 2021 by UK and US media. Fesenko, who quit AdNow after the scandal, said he had no contact with Fazze. He said AdNow was sold after Serebryansky’s death in 2023.

Fesenko said financial scams and fake medicines spread on advertising platforms because they were “a lot more profitable than selling books”. He said AdNow and other similar agencies had flourished in the region for nearly a decade.

“Romania was a pretty big market for these advertisers,” he said. “It’s a big country, not too poor, and the people are not that well educated.”

Paul-Olivier Dehaye, a Belgian mathematician who runs an artificial intelligence company called Hestia.ai, described online advertising as “the disinformation of the future”.

“You can really target very precise information with those tools, all the way to individuals and individual devices,” said Dehaye. The tools, he said, “can be used to seed strategic content including micro influencing”.

Additional reporting by Polina Ivanova