When AI starts pretending to be your PR team, it's a problem

Nadya Movchan runs a PR agency that, it turns out, employed a whole roster of people who don't exist. Futurism journalist Maggie Harrison Dupré found more than a dozen fictional representatives at Movchan Agency, each with a name, a biography, and often an AI-generated or stock headshot, all deployed to pitch real journalists. Movchan's explanation was a Gmail deliverability problem that forced her to buy pre-warmed domains that came bundled with these invented personas as a temporary fix. The trouble is journalists found pitches from these fake people dating back to 2025, which suggests the practice wasn't so temporary after all.

What makes this odd is that Movchan Agency also does completely legitimate work. Tech.eu's own reporter has taken real pitches from the agency that led to genuine interviews with founders at Zing Coach, Gradient Labs, HOLYWATER, and Woofz. So this wasn't a shell operation running entirely on fiction. It was a real agency layering fake staff on top of real relationships, which somehow makes the whole thing harder to explain away.

Gradient Labs CEO Dimitri Masin, a Movchan client who says he had no idea any of this was happening, thinks the scandal is a symptom rather than an isolated incident. He estimates roughly 70 percent of the unsolicited email he now gets comes from fake identities powered by AI, and points to companies like Artisan, whose sales-bot marketing literally tells people to stop hiring humans, as evidence of how quickly synthetic outreach has become just another business tool rather than something to hide.

The deeper issue isn't that PR firms exist or that agencies pitch journalists on behalf of clients. That relationship, done properly, is how a lot of legitimate news reaches reporters in the first place, and good PR people do real, difficult work: sourcing experts on deadline, wrangling interviews across time zones, herding journalists through unfamiliar cities at 11pm. The problem is what happens when there's no accountable person attached to a pitch. If an email turns out to contain false claims, and there's no actual human behind the name and face, nobody can be held responsible. That's not a new failure mode either — Hedonova pulled a similar stunt in 2023, announcing funding rounds for startups that didn't exist, using invented staff photos straight out of the crypto-whitepaper playbook.

Movchan says she's shutting the practice down, which is easy to say once you've been caught by a national outlet. Whether that fixes anything structurally is a separate question, because the incentive that produced fake personas in the first place — cheap, scalable outreach that looks human — isn't going anywhere. Journalism and PR are still fundamentally relationship businesses built on trust that takes years to earn and about one bad news cycle to destroy. No amount of automation is going to rebuild that once it's gone.