After the founder’s arrest, Telegram began sharing information about thousands more users with the police

Since changing its policy in response to the arrest of its founder last year, messaging app Telegram has greatly increased its cooperation with law enforcement agencies around the world, sharing details of thousands more users than before.

In the US, Telegram provided police with 108 user IP addresses or phone numbers in connection with 14 cases in the first nine months of 2024, according to the company’s quarterly transparency reports. In the fourth quarter of the year, Telegram provided US agencies with IP addresses or phone numbers for 2,145 users stemming from 900 requests from law enforcement.

In August, the French authorities arrested and loaded Telegram founder Pavel Durov for allowing drug trafficking and child abuse on the platform. Until the end of September, Durov announced that the company will begin sharing more information in response to legal requests from law enforcement.

Data from the 2024 Transparency Report collected by Telegram users in more than a dozen countries shows that the company has delivered on that promise.

In the first half of the year, Telegram shared identifying information about only 54 users with French authorities. Between July and the end of September, this jumped to 632 users (Durov was arrested on August 24). And in the last three months of the year, Telegram gave French authorities information on 1,386 users.

In the UK, more than 98 percent of law enforcement requests for user information that Telegram responded to came in the fourth quarter. In Finland it is 79 percent and in Belgium it is 74 percent.

Among the countries included in Telegram’s aggregated transparency data set that Gizmodo examined, India saw the most cooperation between Telegram and law enforcement. In 2024 the company has provided IP addresses or phone numbers for 23,535 users in response to 14,641 requests from Indian authorities.

More than half of these requests—7,649—came in the fourth quarter. But unlike other countries, where Telegram responded to few, if any, legal requests for user data from January to September, data from India showed the company was responding to thousands of requests each quarter even before the policy changes.

Durov’s arrest in France came after years in which law enforcement authorities were increasingly angry that the company was not helping with investigations in the same way they expected from other social media and messaging platforms.

Telegram, which allows the creation of large group messages that, although not encrypted, are still more private than other social media, has become popular for various illegal activities.

When Durov announced that Telegram would begin sharing more information with law enforcement, in addition to changes to the platform’s search function, he said: “These measures should discourage criminals… We will not allow bad actors to threaten the integrity of our platform for nearly a billion users.”