First of all, I am not a Pi Network member or have any vested interest on it. However, I have read about it a few years ago. I remember it was launched on the Pi Day of 2019. It was on the Stanford news pages.
The people behind this are real, they are lecturers of Stanford and publicly visible. There's a white paper on the Pi Network drafted by Prof David Mazières ( Professor of Computer Science) describing the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP) architechture used. It's a more generic form of the blockchain.
However, it's not exactly clear how it works from this point onwards. At the current phase they are trying to consolidate some 5 Milllion participants. It's not a crypto currency at this stage and hence carry no real value attached to it.
But there is Phase 2 and Phase 3 of this project and I have not read anything about it recently because I have no interest.
But someone cannot just dismiss it claiming a scam or adware. These things take a long time to establish, if at all it turns out to be successful. Don't forget when the Bitcoin started in 2008 it had a value of less than 1 cent of a USD.
If anyone has evidence that this is a scam please post some links for other's benefit.