CEO Pavel Durov was charged on Wednesday by French authorities with officially supporting several criminal acts on the popular chat network, following his detention on Saturday.
Following his detention on Saturday, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov was officially charged by French authorities on Wednesday with aiding a long list of illegal activities on the well-known messaging network. He was also placed under formal investigation. Durov, a French national who was born in Russia, is accused of aiding and abetting organized crime, drug trafficking, illegal transactions, and the dissemination of child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Additional charges against Durov include “refusal to communicate, at the request of competent authorities, information or documents necessary for carrying out and operating interceptions allowed by law,” as stated in the press release translated into English.
After stepping off a private aircraft, the 39-year-old was taken into custody at Le Bourget airport, which is located north of Paris, on Saturday at 8 p.m. local time. Durov has been forced to post a €5 million bond in order to avoid pretrial custody; nonetheless, he is prohibited from leaving the country and is required to report to the authorities twice a week.The arrest is related to a July 8, 2024, French court inquiry into an unidentified individual, which was mostly sparked by Telegram’s loose moderation guidelines, which allowed malicious and extremist content to proliferate on the site. It is stated that a preliminary investigation got underway in February 2024.
The cybercrime fighting section (J3) of JUNALCO (National Jurisdiction for the Fight against Organized Crime) within the Paris prosecutor’s office, in particular by OFMIN (National Office for Minors), was made aware of Telegram’s nearly complete noncompliance with judicial requisitions, according to Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau. The same observation was made by other French investigative services, public prosecutors, and several Eurojust partners, particularly Belgian ones, when consulted. This is what prompted JUNALCO to launch an inquiry into the messaging service managers’ potential criminal responsibility for these violations.”
Charges against Durov also consist of the provision of cryptographic services with no conformance declaration that guarantees secrecy. Importing and supplying cryptographic tools that do not fully guarantee integrity control or authentication without first declaring This development represents one of the few times a chief executive of a corporation has been held accountable for what people post on a large platform with over 950 million monthly active users. Durove established the Russian social networking network Vkontakte in 2006, where he most recently served as CEO. After that, Telegram was introduced in 2013.
Telegram stated he has “nothing to hide” and that “it is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform” in a statement posted on X following Durov’s detention. Additionally, the business says it frequently reports on thousands of child abuse-related groups and channels being removed from the messaging app. It’s also important to note that the website expressly states in its terms of service that it will not respond to requests pertaining to the sharing of illicit material in group and Telegram chats. Since then, Politico has revealed that in March 2024, arrest warrants were issued by French authorities for Telegram CEO Pavel Durov and his brother Nikolai, who was also a co-founder. On Monday, French President Emmanuel Macron declared that Durov’s detention was not a political choice.
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