{"id":576306,"date":"2026-05-10T11:30:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-10T11:30:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/576306\/"},"modified":"2026-05-10T11:30:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-10T11:30:08","slug":"ai-gave-me-your-number-ai-doxxing-turning-chatgpt-hallucinations-into-harassment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/576306\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018AI gave me your number\u2019: AI doxxing turning ChatGPT hallucinations into harassment"},"content":{"rendered":"

The phone calls began out of nowhere and continued, unsolicited, for over a month. Each caller was a different person seeking help \u2013 everything from legal advice to being locked out of a home. The one thing the strangers had in common was that they had found the phone number through Google\u2019s AI<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This is the reported experience of one victim of a new trend known as \u201cAI doxxing\u201d, which involves popular platforms like Gemini<\/a> or ChatGPT sharing people\u2019s private information<\/a> without their consent. In this instance, the victim\u2019s personal phone number appears to have been used as a placeholder whenever users asked the AI to provide contact details for a company or service.<\/p>\n

\u201cStrangers are calling me constantly looking for a lawyer, a product designer, a locksmith \u2013 you name it,\u201d they wrote in a post to Reddit\u2019s r\/Google forum. \u201cEvery single one of them tells me: \u2018I got your number from Google\u2019s AI\u2019. This is a massive privacy violation and data leak. My phone doesn\u2019t stop ringing with random people expecting a service, and my daily life is being completely disrupted.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other reported instances of AI doxxing include Elon Musk\u2019s Grok chatbot exposing home addresses of non-public figures<\/a>, Meta\u2019s WhatsApp AI assistant mistakenly sharing people\u2019s private numbers<\/a>, and ChatGPT hallucinating incriminating information about an individual<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Privacy experts warn that the cases highlight how generative artificial intelligence<\/a> systems have amplified long-standing problems surrounding online data collection. Large language models (LLMs) generate responses from material gathered from across the internet, including outdated records, forum posts and scraped databases that can potentially surface incorrect or private information.<\/p>\n

\u201cGemini\u2019s problem is not a defect. It\u2019s the result of unchecked years of data brokerage practices that meet generative AI,\u201d a spokesperson for data removal service ClearNym told The Independent.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor a decade and counting, many organisations have been discreetly harvesting information such as personal phone numbers, addresses, familial relationships, and other personally identifiable details from public databases and opt-outs. This information was sold, traded, and thrown into machine learning training sets. It now returns as accurate copies or even fabrications and, most recently, as \u2018placeholder\u2019 phone numbers for any number of strangers.\u201d<\/p>\n

ClearNym researchers claim that the arrival of newer, more powerful AI models that are trained on even more data means the problem will likely get even worse, saying it could be one of the biggest privacy stories of the year. <\/p>\n

The lack of rules, such as the right to be forgotten legislation that allows a person to remove private information from results on search engines like Google, mean that victims also have very few resources to protect themselves.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey cannot order AI to forget this information, they cannot go after all the data brokers feeding the algorithms, and there is no regulatory oversight,\u201d the spokesperson said.<\/p>\n

When contacted by The Independent, a Google spokesperson said: \u201cWe have safeguards in place to prevent personal content from surfacing on Search AI features, along with dedicated tools to request its removal. We review all requests and take action when we have sufficient information to verify that the content appeared and that it violates our policies.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

A report<\/a> last month from Virgin Media O2 found that millions of Brits have been served with fake customer service numbers via AI tools, with criminals now exploiting this issue by injecting their own phone numbers into LLM-powered systems in order to influence the results. By posing as trusted brands, they are able to steal data, perpetuate fraud, and lure victims into scams.<\/p>\n

\u201cCriminals know when people search for help, they\u2019re often looking for a quick answer,\u201d said Murray Mackenzie, director of fraud prevention at Virgin Media O2. \u201cAI tools are creating new opportunities for fraudsters to create realistic-looking fake numbers that appear through search results or chatbots, putting people at risk of calling a criminal rather than their trusted provider.\u201d<\/p>\n

Scammers are able to do this by \u201cseeding poisoned content\u201d across the web in places like Yelp reviews or YouTube comments, according to separate research from AI security firm Aurascape. <\/p>\n

By including keywords like \u201cofficial British Airways reservations number\u201d, the fake phone numbers are picked up by AI web crawlers that are used to train the LLMs.<\/p>\n

\u201cAttackers are quietly rewriting the web that AI systems read,\u201d said Qi Deng, lead security researcher at Aurascape\u2019s Aura Labs. \u201cWhen you ask an assistant how to call your airline, it does exactly what it was designed to do, but with a customer support and reservations number that leads straight to a scammer instead of the real company.\u201d<\/p>\n

Security experts say people can avoid falling victim to such scams by only using numbers listed on official company websites. But for those whose phone numbers end up in the answers of chatbot queries accidentally, there seems to be little that can be done to prevent it from happening. <\/p>\n

\u201cStandard support forms are a complete dead end,\u201d the person whose number is being served up through Google\u2019s Gemini and AI overviews said. \u201cI submitted an official legal removal\/ privacy request to Google, asking them to urgently blacklist my number from their LLM outputs. I haven\u2019t received a single response, and the harassment continues daily.\u201d<\/p>\n

This difficulty of fixing an LLM when it has already been trained was evident this week when OpenAI was forced to acknowledge ChatGPT\u2019s goblin obsession<\/a>. Whether it\u2019s hallucinations<\/a> turned into harassment or poisoned data leading to scammers, there is currently no easy answer to this problem. While search engines can \u201cforget<\/a>\u201d, AI models cannot simply unlearn.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The phone calls began out of nowhere and continued, unsolicited, for over a month. Each caller was a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":576307,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-576306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=576306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576306\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/576307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=576306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=576306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=576306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}