-Analysis-
On the evening of Aug. 24, Telegram founder Pavel Durov was detained near Paris for refusing to cooperate with the French police. The press listed the following charges: Durov does not want to moderate chats and groups where scammers operate and drugs, child pornography and terrorist propaganda are distributed, which means he is an accomplice.
The official charges were supposed to be released on Monday, but so far, the court has only extended his detention until Wednesday, Aug. 28.
Important Stories has summarized the claims that Western authorities have made against Durov in recent years.
Lone wolf
Under European law, platform operators are required to cooperate with governments to investigate criminal cases. Since 2020, the German Federal Ministry of Justice and the Prosecutor’s Office have persistently asked Durov to contact them to take joint action, but there was simply no response from Dubai, where Durov and Telegram had settled.
The German police then established a working group to combat Telegram and opened two criminal cases against the platform. Telegram was initially fined 55 million euros and blocked in the country. Ultimately, the platform was fined 5.1 million and only blocked for certain functions related to financial transactions (these blocks can be bypassed if the German Telegram user does not have a German number).
Durov began direct negotiations with Germany’s Interior Ministry, and the platform carried out some of their demands: by early 2023, Telegram had satisfied 419 of 445 requests to remove content but refused to provide user IP addresses in 230 cases. Yet Durov did disclose user data for 25 of the requests. These included instances of child pornography and terrorist propaganda.
A case against Telegram was later opened in Spain for claims related to pirated content. On March 23, 2024, a court in Spain ruled to block the messaging application but suspended the decision two days later.
Drugs and weapons
The sale of illegal substances and firearms on Telegram is a significant challenge for European countries. While in Russia, traders mostly operate through darknet platforms and use only the most secure messengers, in Germany or France they operate openly.
Telegram has become a simple alternative to the darknet for European criminals, German law enforcement say. Couriers literally deliver drugs (often with additives that increase the risk of death several times over) and firearms to your doorstep. The traders do not conceal themselves and call their chats and channels by the names of legendary darknet marketplaces such as “Silk Road,” the Internet’s first dark web market for illicit goods, which was closed down by the FBI in 2013.
Since 2019, Telegram has also seen a surge in activity by neo-Nazis and QAnon conspiracy theorists.
“In Germany, for example, unlike in the United States, there is no specialized weapons police, and therefore insufficient resources for total control of transactions in messaging applications. If someone is caught, then these are isolated cases,” Lars Winkelsdorf, an expert on the European weapons black market, explained.
Drug trafficking also occurs on a smaller scale on WhatsApp, but so far, only the United States is carrying out investigations against the application’s parent company, Meta.
You can read more about how weapons from the war in Ukraine are spreading across Europe via Telegram here.
Terrorism and sabotage
Since Telegram’s launch in 2013, it has been used to recruit fighters and raise money for al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Islamic State (ISIS); since 2019, the messaging application has also seen a surge in activity by neo-Nazis and QAnon conspiracy theorists.
ISIS has been distributing their propaganda newspapers and videos since at least 2015 and runs the official terrorist news agency Amaq. At a TechCrunch conference in 2015, Durov said that “the right to privacy is more important than the fear of things like terrorism.” Shortly after Durov’s speech, IS militants carried out three terrorist attacks in Paris in one evening, killing 130 people and wounding 416. The preparations for the attack were discussed on Telegram.
Durov changed his perspective following the attack. Telegram began deleting ISIS chats and bots, and in 2018, it changed its privacy policy and launched a joint project with the EU’s law enforcement agency, Europol. Under the new rules, Telegram agreed to hand over IP addresses and phone numbers of users to security services if the court suspects them of terrorism.
“The company has made significant efforts to eradicate crime on the platform. They have strengthened their technical capabilities to counter malicious content and established close partnerships with international organizations such as Europol,” European police said of Durov.
But ISIS still maintains a vast network of chatbots, open and closed chats and Telegram channels. Russians are particularly familiar with this practice due to the terrorist attack on Moscow’s Crocus City Hall: before the assault, the terrorists posted a video on Telegram threatening to commit a terrorist attack, and afterwards posted footage of the shooting itself.
Sabotage in Europe
At the same time, Important Stories was able to identify a network of chats and channels of the ISIS wing Wilayat Khorasan, (which refers to a historic region in Central Asia including parts of Afghanistan, Iran, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan) and was responsible for the massacre in Moscow.
Important Stories found a publicly available crypto wallet that the ISIS used to collect money and then transfer payment for the attack to the militants. Using only publicly available tools, Important Stories also accessed the chats where ISIS propagandists preached and recruited new terrorists in Tajikistan. Important Stories has observed how these chats and channels are now deleted from time to time but then immediately recreated.
After Moscow terrorist attack, Durov reported blocking “tens of thousands” of calls for terrorist attacks as well as thousands of users, but this did not solve the problem of the ISIS network.
Durov’s platform does not combat the spread of legal or illegal pornography.
In the second year of the war in Ukraine, the GRU Russian military intelligence agency began to exploit drug delivery chats and other criminal communities on Telegram.
The Dossier Center (Russian opposition figure Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s investigative project tracking the criminal activity of various people associated with the Kremlin) discovered that GRU officers were using these channels to recruit marginalized people for small-scale diversions and acts of sabotage on military infrastructure facilities in Europe, including France, Britain and Germany.
Several of these agents planned large-scale terrorist attacks in France, but they were detained.
Child pornography
Another charge, according to sources in French publications, is Telegram’s complicity in the distribution of illegal content that violates children’s rights. This language refers to the child pornography that is being published in Telegram channels.
In general, Durov’s platform does not combat the spread of legal or illegal pornography. Apple’s policy requires any application in the AppStore (including Telegram) to block access to 18+ content. Telegram hides such channels with a filter, but does not delete them. Moreover, the content is hidden only from iOS and MacOS users, but not from other operating systems.
In 2022, BBC journalists investigated a case where a Malaysian woman who found her naked childhood photos in pedophile communities tried to complain to the Telegram administration. In the end, moderators blocked only one group with such content, and only after mass complaints. The moderators themselves told journalists on condition of anonymity that no one in Telegram uses artificial intelligence to analyze and search for illegal content that involves children, and in general they do not look for it.
Scams
Telegram has many chats, groups and bots offering financial services that are often unsafe.
Since the late 2010s, Durov has been trying to launch his TON (Telegram Open Network) blockchain project and its associated Gram cryptocurrency, but the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) blocked the launch, considering it an attempt to sell off unregistered securities, which can be used in investment scams. Durov eventually reached a settlement with the SEC: he stopped the sale of the securities, returned the money to their buyers, and paid a small fine for his business – less than million.
But he did not abandon his intentions – anonymous “enthusiasts” continued to develop The Open Network. The Toncoin cryptocurrency was launched, integrated into Telegram and is now used by scammers, among others.
For example, scammers developed a referral link scheme promising multiple increases in revenue and used this scheme to steal tokens from TON network users from all over the world. The link invited users to an unofficial Telegram bot to which a Web3 wallet could be linked. The scammers then told users that they needed to buy income generation “accelerators.” The “accelerators” turned out to be a dud, and users ended up handing over amounts of up to ,700 to the scammers.
