An investigation carried out in India revealed the widespread use of the Telegram application for the distribution of child sexual abuse material and the execution of financial fraud. A government document confirmed that authorities are actively monitoring groups on the platform.
The extensive report, with 35 pages, was prepared by the Cybercrime Coordination Center of the Ministry of the Interior. This material was crucial to the government’s successful defense in a court case seeking to ban the app for seven days due to an alleged leak of a medical school admissions exam.
Previously, Telegram faced accusations of failing to combat misinformation on its channels, something the company vehemently denies. The restriction imposed on the application was lifted on Tuesday, but the functionality to edit old messages will remain disabled until June 30th.
In the same document, the Indian government expressed great concern about Telegram’s privacy features. Such features enable users to chat without the need to expose their phone numbers, which poses a challenge in identifying their true identities for crime-fighting purposes.
One crucial difference is that WhatsApp, the market leader in messaging apps in India with more than 500 million users, does not offer this same flexibility of anonymity.
“Cybercriminals take advantage of Telegram to access restricted channels and groups”, details the report, which, despite not being public, was examined by Reuters. The document also highlights that “India is actively monitoring these Telegram groups and channels.”
When contacted by Reuters to comment on the matter, both Telegram and the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs chose not to comment on the information released.
Telegram’s growing global scrutiny
The scrutiny over the app in India, its biggest market with more than 150 million users, represents just the latest in a series of global investigations.
In 2024, France began investigating activities of organized criminal groups operating on Telegram. In the same period, the application was involved in controversies in South Korea, due to the presence of deepfake images and videos of women with explicit sexual content in their chats. In Spain, its use was temporarily suspended due to copyright disputes.
More recently, in April, the UK communications regulator also opened an inquiry against Telegram. The measure occurred after evidence emerged that child sexual abuse material was circulating on the platform. The company, in turn, refuted the accusations, declaring that, as of 2018, it had managed to “practically eliminate” the public broadcasting of this type of content through its detection algorithms.
Details of illegal content and cybercrime reports in India
The Indian government document, dated June 10, presented photographic evidence of Telegram groups running misleading job advertisements. Evidence of sexual abuse and child exploitation was also found, as well as a pirated copy of “Dhurandhar,” a popular Bollywood spy film.
During the legal process, Telegram maintained that an internal analysis of its platform indicated that the illegal material corresponded to less than 0.1% of the total content available.
However, the government report points out that, since 2023, more than 688 thousand complaints have been registered related to the use of Telegram in cyber fraud schemes. It is estimated that these scams have caused losses of approximately 750 million dollars to the Indian population.
The official report also highlighted that several Telegram channels, groups and user profiles were the target of complaints by citizens, regarding cases of online harassment and dissemination of child sexual abuse content. Between January and May of this year alone, 1,556 reports were recorded specifically about the misuse of Telegram.