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. Under the Sebi Act, the regulator has the power to carry out search and seizure of books, registers, documents including electronics and digital devices from any person associated with the securities market. Pavel Durov, Telegram's CEO, is known as "the Russian Mark Zuckerberg," for co-founding VKontakte, which is Russian for "in touch," a Facebook imitator that became the country's most popular social networking site. As such, the SC would like to remind investors to always exercise caution when evaluating investment opportunities, especially those promising unrealistically high returns with little or no risk. Investors should also never deposit money into someoneβs personal bank account if instructed. At this point, however, Durov had already been working on Telegram with his brother, and further planned a mobile-first social network with an explicit focus on anti-censorship. Later in April, he told TechCrunch that he had left Russia and had βno plans to go back,β saying that the nation was currently βincompatible with internet business at the moment.β He added later that he was looking for a country that matched his libertarian ideals to base his next startup.
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