"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. Perpetrators of these scams will create a public group on Telegram to promote these investment packages that are usually accompanied by fake testimonies and sometimes advertised as being Shariah-compliant. Interested investors will be asked to directly message the representatives to begin investing in the various investment packages offered. Messages are not fully encrypted by default. That means the company could, in theory, access the content of the messages, or be forced to hand over the data at the request of a government. "There are a lot of things that Telegram could have been doing this whole time. And they know exactly what they are and they've chosen not to do them. That's why I don't trust them," she said. "He has kind of an old-school cyber-libertarian world view where technology is there to set you free," Maréchal said.
from vn