The Movchan Agency controversy shows why trust remains the foundation of journalism and public relations.
The comms, PR, and journo world is a small one. Over the weekend, I had half a dozen people send me the same Futurism article via WhatsApp. It detailed UK-based PR firm Movchan Agency, which journalist Maggie Harrison Dupré at Futurism found had created numerous fake PR representatives — including names, email addresses, biographies, and, in some cases, AI-generated/stock-photo headshots — to pitch stories to journalists.
I was disappointed. As a journalist, trust and relationships are everything. I was also confused, because I’d received plenty of entirely legitimate pitches from Movchan Agency over the years that resulted in interviews and coverage, including an interview with Zing coach CEO Anton Marchanka, Gradient Labs CEO Dimitri Masin, Anatolii Kasianov, co-founder and co-CEO of HOLYWATER, and Natalia Shahmetova from nove8, developer of Woofz.
So, I’m struggling to understand why the agency felt the need to create more than a dozen fictional PR personas. In response to Futurism’s questions, founder Nadya Movchan said:
“A few months ago (likely after one of Gmail’s deliverability updates), we had a major issue with our domain reputation. While we started working on the recovery, we decided to purchase pre-warmed domains, so as not to halt outreach, as a temporary measure. They came with pre-warmed mailboxes with set names and pictures from the vendor.”
Yet despite this claim, journalists found press pitches in their inbox from 2025, meaning the practice had been going on for a fair amount of time. Freelance journalist Ellen Chang revealed on Bluesky, “I found dozens of their so-called ‘pitches’ in my inbox after reading your article.
“I even caught one of them last Oct. claiming I wanted to meet a founder who attended Money2020 but asked to meet in LA when the conf. is in Vegas.”
According to journalist Harrison Dupré, the Movchan agency’s clients were unaware of the practice, which the company will wind down — no doubt because they got caught. I reached out to Gradient Labs CEO Dimitri Masin to get his take as a client on the news. He was surprised:
“I was not aware they were using such practices. That’s disappointing. But I suspect it’s much more widespread than people realise. AI-generated outreach from fake identities is becoming an epidemic. I’d estimate around 70 per cent of the unsolicited emails I receive now fall into that category.”
He mentioned Artisan, whose AI sales employee product and “Stop Hiring Humans” billboard campaign illustrate how quickly synthetic outreach is becoming normalised.
PR isn’t the problem
To be clear, while I do post the odd post on LinkedIn complaining about PR practices — press pitches sent without notice is my number one bugbear — I do, as a rule, get along really well with PRs and genuinely respect their work. Heck, I even started a group in Berlin for women in comms, PR, journalism and related roles!
That said, if you’re a startup or VC, you don’t have to use a PR agency.
I get dozens of press pitches via email or LinkedIn messaging weekly — quite a few which result in interviews and articles. And they certainly aren’t universally adored. I once met with the head of technology at a highly respected publication that shall not be named, who told me that any journalist who wrote up news they received from a PR “shouldn’t be working.”
Ironically, he’s no longer in that role.
Why journalists and PRs need each other
But good journalism isn’t about rejecting information because it came from a PR — it’s about verifying it, questioning it, adding context, and deciding whether it’s genuinely newsworthy.
The challenge is that good PRs are, to most media consumers, largely invisible. Most people don’t really understand the difference between PR and journalists and often don’t care. But the relationship between journalists and PR professionals has always been strong.
A lot of company news reaches reporters via PRs, whether they’re in-house teams or agencies. Further, good PRs are crucial for getting quotes at short notice for breaking news, hustling to source technical experts, and locking in an interview with a founder crossing multiple time zones a week.
Then there are the countless events organised by PR teams, from product launches to press attendance at conferences. They often mean managing groups of journalists in unfamiliar cities — places that are just as unknown to the PRs as they are to us. I have nothing but sympathy for anyone tasked with herding a drunken group of bawdy journalists from one venue to the next.
A sentiment about this relationship was echoed by Julija “JJ” Jegorova, founder of Black Unicorn PR, who wrote on LinkedIn that the issue goes well beyond one agency.
“From the veridity and authenticity of what’s shared, to the manner in which it’s shared. The relationship between a PR and a journalist is sacred, dare I say …
Readers are counting on the journalists and editors trusting in their work. The trust component is far too important. Fake personas or AI slop will trigger a huge red flag…”
When accountability disappears
Anyone with an ounce of insight knows that the state of journalism today typically revolves around short-time-stretched teams, meaning trust is even more important. And if there’s no one behind an email, if a pitch contains false or misleading claims, there is no real person behind the identity who can be held responsible.
Unfortunately, this is not the first time I’ve encountered fabricated identities or fictional narratives in tech PR.
In 2023, I wrote an expose on hedge fund Hedonova for announcing funding rounds in startups – neither of which existed. Like the situation with Movchan Agency, it followed the trope anyone will remember from the days of reading crypto startup whitepapers: using stock images to promote staff or advisors that don’t exist but extended to criminal activity. Fortunately the company no longer exists.
Further, to their credit, it sounds like Movchan is having a reckoning.
Movchan conceded, “This is definitely not the quality of work that I live up to as a founder, and I will make sure this does not happen again.”
Every week I receive pitches for AI tools that promise to automate outreach, newsletters, copywriting and just about everything else. But journalism — and PR — is ultimately a relationship business. Trust and mutual respect are hard-won and easily lost. Once they’re gone, no amount of automation can bring them back.