Why Pavel Durov is Unpopular in Europe and the U.S.

On Saturday evening, August 24, Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, was detained near Paris for refusing to cooperate with the French police. The press, citing sources, lists the charges: Durov does not want to moderate chat rooms and groups where scammers, drugs, porn with children, and terrorist propaganda are rampant, which means he is an accomplice. The official wording of the charges was expected to be known on Monday, but so far the court has only extended the detention until Wednesday, August 28.

"Important Stories" reminds which claims were brought against Durov by the authorities of Western countries in the past few years.

Not cooperating well

Under European laws, platform operators are obliged to cooperate with the state in criminal investigations. Since 2020, the Ministry of Justice and the German prosecutor's office persistently asked Durov to get in touch to jointly take action, but there was simply no response from Dubai, where Durov and Telegram had settled. Then the German police created a working group to fight Telegram and initiated two criminal cases. The platform faced a fine of 55 million euros and blocking in the country. In the end, the fine amounted to only 5.1 million, and the platform was blocked only for certain functions related to financial transactions (these blockings are bypassed if the German user of Telegram does not have a German number).

Durov began direct negotiations with the German Interior Ministry, and the platform met some of the requirements: by the beginning of 2023, Telegram satisfied 419 out of 445 requests to remove content, but refused to provide users' IP addresses in 230 cases. At the same time, Durov still disclosed user data for 25 requests. These were about child porn and terrorist propaganda.

Soon the process against "Telegram" began already in Spain, claims related to pirated content. On March 23, 2024, the court in Spain decided to block the messenger, but two days later suspended the decision.

Drugs and weapons

The sale of illegal substances and illegal firearms on Telegram is a big problem for countries in Europe. While in Russia traffickers mainly operate through darknet platforms and use the most secure messengers possible, in Germany or France they operate openly.

"Telegram" has become an easy alternative to the darknet for European criminals, German law enforcers complain. Drugs (often with impurities that increase the risk of lethal outcomes over time) and military guns are delivered by couriers to the doorstep. The traffickers themselves do not hide and call their chat rooms and channels by the names of legendary darknet marketplaces like Silk Road.

"In Germany, for example, unlike in America, there is no specialized gun police, and therefore not enough resources for total control of transactions in messengers. If someone is caught, it is only in isolated cases," Lars Winkelsdorf, an expert on the European arms black market, explained to Important Stories.

In smaller volumes, drug trafficking also occurs via WhatsApp, but so far only the United States is dealing with Meta.

We wrote more about how weapons from the war in Ukraine are spreading across Europe via Telegram here.

Terrorism and sabotage

Al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Islamic State (IS) have been recruiting fighters and raising money on Telegram since its launch in 2013, and since 2019, the messenger has seen a surge in activity by neo-Nazis and supporters of QAnon conspiracy theories.

IS has been distributing its propaganda newspapers and videos since at least 2015 and also runs accounts for the official terrorist news agency Amaq. At the TechCrunch conference in 2015, Durov said that "the right to privacy is more important than fear of things like terrorism." Shortly after Durov's speech, IS militants carried out three terrorist attacks in Paris in one night; they killed 130 people and injured 416. Discussions about the preparation for the terrorist attack were going on in Telegram.

Already after that, Durov changed his views. The platform began to delete chats and bots of the IG, and in 2018 launched a joint project with Europol and changed the privacy policy. Under the new rules, Telegram agreed to hand over IP addresses and phone numbers of users to intelligence agencies if they are recognized as terrorism suspects by the court.

"The company has made significant efforts to eradicate criminality 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 officers praised Durov.

The IS still maintains an extensive network of chatbots, open and closed chat rooms, and channels on Telegram. Russians became particularly familiar with this phenomenon in connection with the terrorist attack in Crocus City - before the attack, the terrorists published a video there threatening to carry out a terrorist attack, and afterward, footage of the shooting itself.

At the same time, "Important Stories" was able to identify a network of chat rooms and channels of the IS wing "Wilayat Khorasan", responsible for the massacre in Moscow. We found an openly available cryptocurrency wallet, which IS used to collect money and then withdraw payment for the terrorist attack to the militants. We also used only open tools to access chat rooms where IS propagandists were preaching and recruiting new terrorists from Tajikistan. According to our observations, these chat rooms and channels are deletting from time to time, but then immediately recreated.

After the terrorist attack in Moscow, Durov reported blocking "tens of thousands" of calls for terrorist attacks and thousands of users, but this did not solve the problem with the IS network.

In the second year of the war in Ukraine, drug courier chats and other criminalized communities in Telegram became a tool of the Russian military intelligence - GRU. As the Dossier Center found out, it was there that GRU officers recruited marginalized people for small-scale sabotage and acts of sabotage on military infrastructure in Europe, including France, Britain, and Germany. Several such agents planned large-scale terrorist attacks in France, but they were apprehended.

Child porn

Another charge, according to French publication sources, is complicity in the distribution of illegal content that violates the rights of children. This wording hides the publication of child porn in Telegram channels.

Durov's platform as a whole is not engaged in the fight against the distribution of legal and illegal porn. Apple's policy suggests that any app in the AppStore (including Telegram) should block access to 18+ content. Therefore, Telegram hides such channels with a bar but does not delete them. And the content is hidden only from iOS and macOS users, but not from other operating systems.

In 2022, journalists of the BBC conducted an investigation, during which a resident of Malaysia, who found her child's nude photos in the communities of pedophiles, tried to complain to the administration of "Telegram" about it. As a result, 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 with children, and in general, they are not looking for them.

Fraud

Many chat rooms, groups, and bots on Telegram offer financial services, which often turn out to be unsafe.

Since the late 2010s, Durov tried to launch his blockchain project TON (Telegram Open Network) and the cryptocurrency Gram, but the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) blocked the launch, considering it an attempt to sell unregistered securities. As a result, Durov settled with the SEC: he stopped the offering, returned the money to the buyers, and paid a small fine for his business - less than 20 million dollars.

But he did not give up his intentions - the development of TON (The Open Network) was continued by anonymous "enthusiasts". The Toncoin cryptocurrency was launched, integrated into Telegram, and began to be used, including by fraudsters.

For example, fraudsters developed a referral link scheme, promising a multiple increase in income, and used this scheme to steal tokens from users of the TON network all over the world. The link invited users to an unofficial Telegram bot to which a Web3 wallet could be linked. The scammers then assured users that they must buy "boosters" to generate revenue. The "boosters" turned out to be nothing, and in the end, users gave the fraudsters amounts of up to $2,700.