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." Since January 2022, the SC has received a total of 47 complaints and enquiries on illegal investment schemes promoted through Telegram. These fraudulent schemes offer non-existent investment opportunities, promising very attractive and risk-free returns within a short span of time. They commonly offer unrealistic returns of as high as 1,000% within 24 hours or even within a few hours. Given the pro-privacy stance of the platform, itโs taken as a given that itโll be used for a number of reasons, not all of them good. And Telegram has been attached to a fair few scandals related to terrorism, sexual exploitation and crime. Back in 2015, Vox described Telegram as โISISโ app of choice,โ saying that the platformโs real use is the ability to use channels to distribute material to large groups at once. Telegram has acted to remove public channels affiliated with terrorism, but Pavel Durov reiterated that he had no business snooping on private conversations. DFR Lab sent the image through Microsoft Azure's Face Verification program and found that it was "highly unlikely" that the person in the second photo was the same as the first woman. The fact-checker Logically AI also found the claim to be false. The woman, Olena Kurilo, was also captured in a video after the airstrike and shown to have the injuries. 'Wild West'
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