How ClearNym Rode the 'AI Doxxing' Trend and Landed The Independent

"In cybersecurity, the news moves faster than almost anywhere else — the moments where we actually have something worth saying as experts come and go in a day or two. So I needed a tool built for speed: a way to quickly find the right people to share our perspective with, fast enough to still be heard while it mattered.

The tools I'd tried before just weren't set up for that. I could never be fully sure I was pitching the right journalists — to know that, you had to sit and research each one by hand. And even then you'd miss, because journalists are people: they change beats, their focus shifts, and sometimes you're simply not the right fit anymore.

That's exactly what this does well — finding the journalists who are on a story right now, in the moment, while it's still news. For how fast our world moves, this service is genuinely a big deal."

— Emily Carter, PR Manager, ClearNym

The challenge

ClearNym was still making a name for itself. As Emily put it in our first call: the goal was "to be heard and to be visible" — two to three campaigns a week, run by a lean in-house PR team.

She'd already tried the usual tools and cancelled them. Platforms advertising "500,000 journalist emails" that produced small, stale lists. Databases where 30% of collected emails bounced. Analytics inflated by bot traffic until open rates were meaningless. A static-database subscription can't tell you who is writing about your topic this week — and for newsjacking, this week is the only week that matters.

The trend ClearNym could credibly ride

In late April 2026, Emily spotted the signal: Google's Gemini was surfacing a real person's phone number in its answers — hallucinated attribution welded to genuinely leaked personal data — and Google wasn't responding to the victim.

Most PR teams would have pitched their product. Emily rode the trend instead, tying the live news hook back to the privacy and data-broker problem ClearNym could credibly explain:

"AI doxxing."

Her framing connected the dots journalists hadn't yet connected: the problem underneath was a decade of unchecked data-broker harvesting colliding with generative AI — with no deletion path, no recourse, and no regulatory oversight.

The execution (where Medialyst came in)

On April 29, Emily briefed Medialyst's campaign agent on the story. Same day:

• Medialyst searched live coverage — not a static database — and surfaced 90 journalists actively writing about AI security, privacy, and data harms, each with recent-article context, an AI fit score, and a personalized angle.
• Every contact ran through email verification before send.
• Emily reviewed the list, shortlisted, and sent 38 personalized pitches.

One of those 38 was Anthony Cuthbertson at The Independent, matched because of his recent reporting on AI security failures anchored on his ChatGPT data-breach piece.

Brief to sent pitches: one day.

The result

By mid-May, the story was national:

• The Independent: "'AI gave me your number': The new trend turning ChatGPT hallucinations into harassment" — carrying a multi-paragraph ClearNym quote, verbatim from Emily's pitch.
• New York Post: "Alarming report reveals AI chatbots are doxxing users' real phone numbers" — quoting ClearNym via The Independent.

Both headlines ran with 'AI doxxing' as the frame. The term was only just surfacing, and Emily was early to the trend — she built the pitch around it and tied it to the decade of data-broker harvesting underneath, the connection most outlets hadn't made yet. That's the difference between asking for coverage and handing a journalist a ready-made frame.

The bigger picture

The Independent win wasn't a one-off spray. Between March 26 and July 12, Emily has run 14 campaigns through Medialyst. Every pitch tied to a live news hook: platform breaches, AI privacy risks, data-broker exposés.

The judgment was Emily's. She saw the signal, sharpened the frame, and wrote the language that got quoted verbatim. Medialyst's job was everything between her insight and the journalist's inbox: finding who's actually writing about the topic right now, verifying they're reachable, and sending — fast enough that the story was still news.