How Telegram Became a Playground for Criminals, Extremists and Terrorists
"Drug dealers, scammers and white nationalists openly conduct business and spread toxic speech on the platform, according to a Times analysis of more than 3.2 million Telegram messages.
For millions of people, Telegram is like any other social media or messaging app.
In Brazil, 167,000 people subscribe to a Telegram channel for news about reality shows and entertainment.
More than one million users in India prepare for government exams in another channel.
And in one called Whale with more than three million followers, crypto trading tips are swapped in Arabic.
Look deeper, and a dark underbelly emerges.
Uncut lumps of cocaine and shards of crystal meth are for sale on the app. Handguns and stolen checks are widely available.
White nationalists use the platform to coordinate fight clubs and plan rallies.
Hamas broadcast its Oct. 7 attack on Israel on the site.
Telegram has become a global sewer of criminal activity, disinformation, child sexual abuse material, terrorism and racist incitement, according to a four-month investigation by The New York Times that analyzed more than 3.2 million Telegram messages from over 16,000 channels. The company, which offers features that enable criminals, terrorists and grifters to organize at scale and to sidestep scrutiny from the authorities, has looked the other way as illegal and extremist activities have flourished openly on the app.
The degree to which Telegram has been inundated by such content has not been previously reported. The Times investigation found 1,500 channels operated by white supremacists who coordinate activities among almost one million people around the world. At least two dozen channels sold weapons. In at least 22 channels with more than 70,000 followers, MDMA, cocaine, heroin and other drugs were advertised for delivery to more than 20 countries.
Hamas, ISIS and other terror groups have thrived on Telegram, often amassing large audiences across dozens of channels. The Times analyzed more than 40 channels associated with Hamas, which showed that average viewership surged up to 10 times after the Oct. 7 attacks, garnering more than 400 million views in October.
Telegram is “the most popular place for ill-intentioned, violent actors to congregate,” said Rebecca Weiner, the deputy commissioner for intelligence and counterterrorism at the New York Police Department. “If you’re a bad guy, that’s where you will land.”
Operating like a stateless organization, Telegram has long behaved as if it were above the law — though that may be changing. Pavel Durov, the Russian-born founder of the platform, was arrested and charged in France last month for failure to cooperate with law enforcement and complicity in crimes committed on the service, including the distribution of child sexual abuse material, drug trafficking and fraud.
In many democratic countries, patience with the app is wearing thin. The European Union is exploring new oversight of Telegram under the Digital Services Act, a law that forces large online platforms to police their services more aggressively, two people familiar with the plans said.
Telegram’s tolerance for toxic activities begins with Mr. Durov, 39, who runs the company with a devout belief that governments should not interfere in what people say or do online. This year, he wrote on his Telegram channel:
Were it entirely up to us, we would always give our users what they ask for: access to uncensored information and opinions so that they can make their own decisions.
April 24
Telegram has benefited people in authoritarian countries who need ways to freely communicate, but the app has also contributed to real-world harm. Hateful discourse that spread on the platform has played a role in recent riots in Britain and arson at migrant housing centers in Ireland.
A disparate collective on Telegram known as Terrorgram, where neo-fascists share messages and videos encouraging violence, has been linked to attacks, including a shooting in 2022 at an L.G.B.T.Q. bar in Slovakia.
Even as Telegram approaches one billion users, it has prided itself on behaving differently from its tech peers. The company, based in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, operates like a start-up, with about 60 full-time employees. It has hired just a few hundred contractors to work as moderators, and it steadfastly ignores most requests for assistance from law enforcement agencies.
An email inbox used for inquiries from government agencies is rarely checked, former employees said. When a House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Capitol Hill sought information from 15 internet platforms, only Telegram did not respond.
In contrast, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok have entire divisions dedicated to complying with law enforcement requests and thousands of moderators scouring their services for illicit and harmful material.
Only Apple and Google, which can expel Telegram from their app stores, have successfully pushed the platform to take down and restrict the spread of harmful material, said analysts, government officials and tech executives. Governments have sometimes turned to the tech giants for help getting Telegram to act.
Hours after The Times sent Telegram a detailed list of questions, Mr. Durov on Thursday posted his first comments to his 12 million-plus followers since his arrest. He said claims that Telegram was “some sort of anarchic paradise are absolutely untrue” and that the company removed “millions of harmful posts and channels everyday.”
He attributed the volume of illicit and harmful content to Telegram’s “growing pains,” adding that “that’s why I made it my personal goal to ensure that we significantly improve things in this regard.”
In a statement to The Times, Telegram said that “99.999 percent of our users” were lawful and that while there was “plenty of work to do,” the platform was making improvements to its features and moderation.
A Marketplace for Crime
In December 2022, Hayden Espinosa began serving a 33-month sentence in federal prison in Louisiana for buying and selling illegal firearms and weapon parts he made with 3-D printers. That did not stop his business.
Using cellphones that had been smuggled into prison, Mr. Espinosa continued his illicit trade on a Telegram channel, which was named after 3-D printing and the Second Amendment right to bear arms, according to an indictment in June by the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg Jr.
One post in the channel’s “shop” offered a menu of prices for weapon parts, including ammunition clips and devices called auto sears, which empty a magazine with a single pull of the trigger. “DM for International Orders,” the post said.
Telegram combines the anonymity of the dark web with the ease-of-use of an online marketplace. It is easy to search and find channels selling guns, illicit narcotics, prescription drugs and fraudulent A.T.M. cards, called clone cards. Alongside photos and videos of available merchandise, dealers leave information on how to message them directly.
Often they act like salesmen, celebrating successful deliveries and touting discounted prices.
How to order:
1. Place Order
2. Payment and confirmation
3. Delivery details
4. Tracking
5. Monitor your package
6. Package arrivals
Delivery via royal Mail ✅
That’s how I work.
No cash on delivery.
If you are not comfortable working that way feel free to try elsewhere..
Stick to this. Unnecessary question will not be authorized
July 4
One reason Telegram has become a haven for such activity stems from its unique features, including “channels” and “supergroups,” which rivals like WhatsApp were slower to add.
Telegram began as a standard text messaging service similar to iMessage or WhatsApp, before it began evolving in 2014 by adding broadcasting features. These “channels” are now one of the platform’s best-known tools for sharing text, images, links and videos by news organizations, world leaders and government agencies.
Telegram then introduced “supergroups,” which harked back to an era of unruly AOL chat rooms. These groups attracted new users but also presented risks.
While WhatsApp kept group chat sizes in the hundreds and limited link sharing to blunt the spread of disinformation, Telegram did the opposite and steadily lifted the cap on group sizes. By 2019, a group administrator could run city-size chat groups with as many as 200,000 users.
Initially, this attracted new users interested in cryptocurrencies. In the crypto world, Telegram became a critical tool for talking about new digital coins and cultivating communities dedicated to, and often heavily invested in, particular currencies.
These tools also attracted a less savory group of users, including extremists, disinformation peddlers and sellers of illicit goods.
“I don’t want to paint with a broad brush,” said Mr. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, “but I think the combination of a number of things — the encryption, the ability to reach large numbers of people, the ability to set up subgroups and their posture toward law enforcement — creates an environment in which it’s not surprising that criminal activity is occurring.”
Nor has the platform dedicated significant resources to weed this activity out. As Telegram ballooned, its staff barely grew. Today, it has contractors and artificial intelligence tools to proactively monitor the public parts of Telegram, which does not include many groups or individual chats.
The company said it had a moderation process, which includes constantly reviewing content, fielding user complaints and publishing daily reports on child sexual abuse materials.
Even so, The Times found at least 50 channels openly selling contraband, including guns, drugs and fraudulent debit cards. One channel that evoked the Wild West with its name called successful deliveries “touchdowns,” a popular slang in such groups.
Telegram’s features — coupled with its refusal to cooperate with the police — have stymied criminal investigations, increasingly frustrating the authorities. The company can gain access to messages unless users select a secret chat option with end-to-end encryption, according to two former employees. On at least two occasions, the company has retrieved the messages of former employees, one person said.
But the company, which denied that employees had access to user data, has refused to share information with governments. France charged Mr. Durov with complicity in trafficking child sexual imagery, among other crimes, because of what the chief prosecutor called “an almost total lack of response” to requests for assistance.
Svenja Meininghaus, a state prosecutor focused on illegal hate speech in Germany, said other major social media platforms had developed practices for working with law enforcement. But “we don’t get any cooperation from Telegram at all,” she said, adding, “I can’t recall one case.”
Telegram said it was “now working hard to make sure we can process legitimate requests from democratic countries while still defending the rights of our users elsewhere.”
Mr. Espinosa’s gun market on Telegram might never have been uncovered except that one of its members was Payton Gendron, who massacred 10 people at a supermarket in Buffalo in 2022.
Investigators scouring his life online for motives for the shooting discovered the channel, which also featured racist and extremist views he had shared.
Having stumbled across the channel’s illicit trade in components of untraceable “ghost guns,” an undercover police officer in New York City reached out to Mr. Espinosa, 24, and bought a handgun, an assault rifle and two silencers from him in August 2023, according to the indictment. A lawyer for Mr. Espinosa with the Legal Aid Society could not be reached for comment.
Live on Telegram, a Terrorist Attack
When Hamas attacked Israel on the morning of Oct. 7, it announced the assault on Telegram.
Within two and a half hours of the first incursions, Hamas began posting grisly videos of the carnage. In the first 72 hours of the war, channels affiliated with the group posted nearly 700 times, receiving over 54 million views, according to The Times’s analysis."
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