After Founder’s Arrest, Telegram Began Sharing Info on Thousands More Users With Police

Since changing its policies in response to the arrest of its founder last year, the messaging app Telegram has vastly increased its cooperation with law enforcement agencies around the world, sharing details about thousands more users than it had previously.

In the U.S., Telegram provided police with 108 user IP addresses or phone numbers in connection to 14 cases during the first nine months of 2024, according to the company’s quarterly transparency reports. In the fourth quarter of the year, Telegram provided U.S. agencies with IP addresses or phone numbers for 2,145 users stemming from 900 law enforcement requests.

In August, French authorities arrested and charged Telegram founder Pavel Durov with enabling drug trafficking and child abuse on the platform. By the end of September, Durov announced that the company would begin sharing more information in response to legal requests from law enforcement agencies.

Transparency report data for 2024 collected by Telegram users in more than a dozen countries shows the company has followed through on that promise.

During the first half of the year, Telegram shared identifying information about only 54 users with French authorities. Between July and the end of September, that jumped to 632 users (Durov was arrested on August 24). And in the last three months of the year, Telegram gave French authorities information about 1,386 users.

In the U.K., more than 98 percent of the law enforcement requests for user information that Telegram responded to came in the fourth quarter. In Finland, it was 79 percent, and in Belgium, it was 74 percent.

Among the countries included in the crowdsourced Telegram transparency dataset that Gizmodo examined, India saw the most cooperation between Telegram and law enforcement. Over the course of 2024, the company supplied IP addresses or phone numbers for 23,535 users in response to 14,641 requests from Indian authorities.

More than half of those requests—7,649—came in the fourth quarter. But unlike other countries, where Telegram responded to few if any legal demands for user data from January through September, the data from India shows that the company was responding to thousands of requests each quarter even before the policy changes.

Durov’s arrest in France came after years of law enforcement agencies growing increasingly angry that the company wasn’t assisting with investigations in the same way they had come to expect from other social media and messaging platforms.

Telegram, which allowed for the creation of large group messages that, while not encrypted, were still more private than other social media venues, had become popular for a variety of illicit activity.

When Durov announced that Telegram would begin sharing more information with law enforcement, in addition to changes to the platform’s search function, he said “These measures should discourage criminals … We won’t let bad actors jeopardize the integrity of our platform for almost a billion users.”