(Credit: Abdullah Serbest/Shutterstock.com)
The United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime says Telegram has become a digital hub for organized crime gangs in Southeast Asia, enabling cybercriminals who run their fraudulent schemes, including deepfake software sales, directly through the app.
UNODC believes there is "strong evidence of underground data markets moving to Telegram and vendors actively looking to target transnational organized crime groups based in Southeast Asia," their findings state in a Reuters report.
Southeast Asia's cybercrime networks rake in anywhere from $27.4 billion to $36.5 billion annually, the UN office says. In many cases, human trafficking helps staff the criminal operations.
The UN office scraped Telegram and found users on the app are increasingly using words associated with deepfake technology, suggesting demand for or interest in the tech may be on the rise. They also found hacked data—including victims' credit cards, passwords, browser history, and other information—being offered for sale and sold on the messaging platform.
"For consumers, this means their data is at a higher risk of being fed into scams or other criminal activity than ever before," Benedikt Hofmann, UNODC deputy representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, tells Reuters.
Telegram chatbots help buyers obtain the illicit goods. The news outlet was able to acquire victims' personal data, including names, phone numbers, addresses, tax information, ID cards, and medical records on the app. The sellers could have obtained this data through a range of methods, like via phishing attacks, malware, ransomware, or through a data breach more broadly.
On Telegram, criminals can also buy malware, deepfake software, or money laundering services, according to the report, though this has been repeatedly documented in the past. In January, a cybersecurity firm found hackers peddling malware-as-a-service tools on Telegram, often using Telegram bots, letting scammers get started for less than $250.
In August, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov—whose former yoga instructor accused him of abusing their children—was arrested in France for allegedly enabling the spread of money laundering, child sexual abuse material, drug sales, and other crime through the app. France's complicity laws were cited for the charges against Durov, who has since blamed the app's large size and "growing pains" for the criminal activity on Telegram. Durov has rejected responsibility for the illicit activity on Telegram and denied the claims of child abuse.
Since then, Durov says Telegram has made changes to its search function to make it harder for buyers to find illicit wares for sale. "Search on Telegram is more powerful than in other messaging apps because it allows users to find public channels and bots. Unfortunately, this feature has been abused by people who violated our Terms of Service to sell illegal goods," Durov wrote.
"Over the last few weeks, a dedicated team of moderators, leveraging AI, has made Telegram Search much safer. All the problematic content we identified in Search is no longer accessible. If you still manage to find something unsafe or illegal in Telegram Search, please report it to us via @SearchReport," the CEO added.
Telegram has also updated its Terms of Service to clarify that users' IP addresses and phone numbers will be provided to police in the case of any criminal investigations—though criminals could certainly use VPNs and alternate phone numbers to get set up on the app.