"And that set off kind of a battle royale for control of the platform that Durov eventually lost," said Nathalie Maréchal of the Washington advocacy group Ranking Digital Rights. Sebi said data, emails and other documents are being retrieved from the seized devices and detailed investigation is in progress. 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 gold standard of encryption, known as end-to-end encryption, where only the sender and person who receives the message are able to see it, is available on Telegram only when the Secret Chat function is enabled. Voice and video calls are also completely encrypted. In December 2021, Sebi officials had conducted a search and seizure operation at the premises of certain persons carrying out similar manipulative activities through Telegram channels.
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