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. These entities are reportedly operating nine Telegram channels with more than five million subscribers to whom they were making recommendations on selected listed scrips. Such recommendations induced the investors to deal in the said scrips, thereby creating artificial volume and price rise. It is unclear who runs the account, although Russia's official Ministry of Foreign Affairs Twitter account promoted the Telegram channel on Saturday and claimed it was operated by "a group of experts & journalists." 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. Channels are not fully encrypted, end-to-end. All communications on a Telegram channel can be seen by anyone on the channel and are also visible to Telegram. Telegram may be asked by a government to hand over the communications from a channel. Telegram has a history of standing up to Russian government requests for data, but how comfortable you are relying on that history to predict future behavior is up to you. Because Telegram has this data, it may also be stolen by hackers or leaked by an internal employee.
from nl
