Despite Telegram's origins, its approach to users' security has privacy advocates worried. In the United States, Telegram's lower public profile has helped it mostly avoid high level scrutiny from Congress, but it has not gone unnoticed. After fleeing Russia, the brothers founded Telegram as a way to communicate outside the Kremlin's orbit. They now run it from Dubai, and Pavel Durov says it has more than 500 million monthly active users. The perpetrators use various names to carry out the investment scams. They may also impersonate or clone licensed capital market intermediaries by using the names, logos, credentials, websites and other details of the legitimate entities to promote the illegal schemes. Just days after Russia invaded Ukraine, Durov wrote that Telegram was "increasingly becoming a source of unverified information," and he worried about the app being used to "incite ethnic hatred."
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