On a warm Saturday in August of 2024, Raphaël Maillochon was celebrating his son’s first birthday when he got a message from one of his sources. Maillochon, a 34-year-old crime reporter for the French broadcaster TF1, was used to contacts in law enforcement pinging him on the weekend. They liked Telegram, which they felt was more secure than other messaging apps. While Maillochon was strictly off work that day, at a country house two hours south of Paris, he couldn’t help but set down the bottle of champagne he’d been about to open and look at his phone.
The source had news about “un gros poisson”—a “big fish.” If confirmed, it was going to trump all other stories in France and beyond. “Stay tuned!” the source wrote.
Maillochon tried to enjoy the birthday party while nervously eyeing his Telegram messages. Around 6 pm, just as his guests were sitting down for aperitifs, the source told him that the gros poisson was none other than Telegram’s CEO, Pavel Durov. Police were tracking Durov’s private jet, and it was due to arrive in Paris that evening from Baku, Azerbaijan. If he was on the plane, they would arrest him.
Although Maillochon used Telegram every day, he had to google its Russian-born CEO. He learned that Durov came to prominence as the cofounder of VKontakte, Russia’s homegrown version of Facebook. His next company, Telegram, made him a global tech mogul. Durov presented himself as a libertarian crusader for privacy and freedom of speech on the internet. In 2014 he blamed the Kremlin for forcing him out of VKontakte and went into self-imposed “exile,” which many saw as proof of his bona fides. Now Telegram was nearing a billion users and, Durov claimed, planning to go public by 2026. Maillochon began to grasp the size of what he was reeling in.
At 8:59 pm, his phone pinged again: “He’s been arrested.” Maillochon excused himself from the party and went outside into the garden. He checked in with other sources in different police departments, the French public prosecutor’s office, and Europol. At 10:24 pm, his story went up on TF1’s website. From there it spread to news outlets around the world.
When Durov disembarked at the small Le Bourget Airport outside Paris, he seemed to have no idea what was about to happen, Maillochon’s sources told him. They said Durov was petulant and haughty in his initial interviews with police. He flaunted his connections, claiming that he had come to Paris to meet with Emmanuel Macron. Durov also reportedly asked that French telecom billionaire Xavier Niel, until recently a majority shareholder in Le Monde newspaper, be notified of his arrest. Politico.eu later reported that Durov even used his one call to phone Niel. (Devon Spurgeon, a public relations consultant for Telegram based in Washington, DC, told WIRED that Durov phoned his own assistant, not Niel. Niel did not reply to WIRED’s requests for comment.)
As Maillochon and other French journalists went on to report, prosecutors had been secretly investigating Durov for months over his and Telegram’s alleged failure to block illegal activity—which authorities claim included fraud, drug trafficking, child sexual abuse material (CSAM), organized crime, and terrorism—on the platform. The French Gendarmerie alone had counted 2,460 cases between 2013 and 2024 in which legal requests made to Telegram had gone unanswered, according to the outlet Libération. Maylis de Roeck, a spokesperson for the prosecutor’s office, told WIRED that when her team realized just how many investigations across different departments were being stymied by Telegram’s lack of response, they decided to issue an arrest warrant. As they saw it, Durov’s silence amounted to complicity.
In the immediate aftermath of the arrest, no one from Telegram commented publicly. One of Durov’s close associates, George Lobushkin—the former head of PR at VKontakte—told WIRED: “I am in shock, and everyone close to Pavel feels the same. Nobody was prepared for this situation.” Lobushkin added that he worried “a lot” about Telegram’s future if Durov remained in custody.
In the US, one of the first to react to the arrest was Tucker Carlson, the right-wing TV host. In a post on X, Carlson called Durov “a living warning to any platform owner who refuses to censor the truth at the behest of governments and intel agencies.” Elon Musk reposted a clip from Carlson’s interview and captioned it “#FreePavel.” Even Edward Snowden, a stern critic of Telegram’s security claims, expressed alarm. “I am surprised and deeply saddened that Macron has descended to the level of taking hostages as a means for gaining access to private communications,” he wrote on X. Macron, for his part, issued a statement that France was “deeply committed to freedom of expression,” adding of the arrest: “It is in no way a political decision. It is up to the judges to rule on the matter.”
On the Sunday evening after Durov’s arrest, his custody was extended to the 96-hour limit. According to Maillochon’s sources, he slept in a cramped cell, although investigators made the rare concession of letting Durov have a fresh set of clothes delivered. Under further questioning, Durov reportedly claimed he hadn’t been unresponsive to takedown requests from law enforcement; police had merely sent their requests to the wrong place. (Durov made a similar claim in 2022 when Brazil’s supreme court temporarily banned Telegram, essentially saying the court’s legal requests had been lost in the mail.) Durov also said he had been in touch with French intelligence services about terrorism cases.
On August 28, nearly four days after his arrest, Durov was formally indicted on six charges. The most serious—complicity in the administration of an online platform to enable organized crime and illicit transactions—carried a maximum penalty of 10 years’ imprisonment, as well as a €500,000 ($521,000) fine. With bail set at €5 million ($5.2 million) and swiftly paid, Durov was released that night but prohibited from leaving the country. He was also ordered to report to a police station twice a week.
The case against Durov, the CEO of a huge mainstream platform, was unprecedented. And it came at a moment when his professed libertarian ideals and laissez-faire attitude to content moderation seemed to be ascendant. The small size of Durov’s team had actually inspired Musk to fire 80 percent of Twitter’s staff when he took it over, according to Character Limit, a book by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac. Musk gutted the company’s moderation and trust-and-safety teams. If Durov could run a platform with about 60 full-time employees, most of them in Dubai, why not try something similar? More recently, Mark Zuckerberg fired Meta’s fact-checkers in the US and loosened the enforcement of rules against inflammatory content on the company’s platforms. The “recent elections,” Zuckerberg said, were a “cultural tipping point toward once again prioritizing speech.”
Durov seems to have been unaware how close to the sun he was flying. One senior former Telegram employee reflected that, while the arrest was not inconceivable under strict European legislation, it was still startling. Yulia Conley, who worked as Telegram’s first official head of external and government relations and has agreed to go on the record for the first time in WIRED, thought it “unreasonable” to hold Durov responsible for everything happening on the platform. “I wouldn’t say that he had it coming,” Conley told WIRED. But she suggested that Telegram’s “scarcity of human capital in this very important domain of content moderation could be the main reason why the current escalation had occurred.” The issues that landed Durov in jail went back years.
On September 21, 2015, Durov sat for an interview at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco. It had been more than a year since he sold his stake in VKontakte, and he portrayed himself as a digital nomad, traveling the world with a cohort of Telegram engineers. He looked the part, clad all in black, and spoke with the self-assurance of a true disrupter.
Telegram was barely two years old and already handling 12 billion messages a day. All the other messaging apps out there? “They suck,” Durov said—especially WhatsApp. The interviewer brought up reports of ISIS operating on Telegram. “Do you sleep well at night knowing that terrorists use your platform?” he asked Durov. First grinning awkwardly, Durov composed himself. “Our right for privacy is more important than our fear of bad things happening, like terrorism,” he said. “I don’t think we should feel guilty about it.”
The next day, Telegram introduced the feature that transformed it from a messaging app to something more like a social network. “Channels” allowed users to broadcast their messages to an unlimited number of subscribers. Within a few days, ISIS operatives started a channel of their own. Barely two months after that, ISIS gunmen and suicide bombers attacked Paris’ Bataclan theater and Stade de France, killing 130 people and injuring hundreds. ISIS used Telegram to claim responsibility to the world.
Five days later, Telegram removed 78 ISIS channels and announced efforts to curb terrorist activity on the platform. Yet it continued to bill the app as a place where users were safe from the prying eyes of authorities, especially if those users communicated via end-to-end encrypted “secret chats.” (Contrary to popular perception, encryption has never been the default setting.) Within weeks of the attacks, the European Union set up an initiative called the Internet Forum, meant to coordinate anti-terrorism efforts between tech platforms and member states. Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter quickly joined up. Not Telegram. Its privacy policy stated bluntly: “We never share your data with anyone. No.”
As a marketing strategy, this brashly defiant pose kept paying dividends in the unlikeliest places. Even as Telegram was becoming known in France as ISIS’s platform of choice, it was also gaining popularity in French political circles. Ludovic Chaker, a manager of Macron’s 2017 presidential campaign, had his team use Telegram groups and “secret chats” for internal communications, a legal representative for Chaker confirmed to WIRED. Telegram quickly spread within the French political establishment. Members of parliament even reportedly identified which of their colleagues were pro-Macron by whether they were on the app.
But Durov’s public image as an Übermensch of privacy and free speech concealed a dowdier reality: He would spend the coming years freely contradicting the tenets of Telegram’s self-mythology when it suited him, dodging its ramifications when he had to, playing ball with governments as necessary, scrambling to pay Telegram’s bills, and then inevitably finding himself buoyed yet again by some event that seemed to validate Telegram’s anti-authoritarian, above-it-all mystique.
Take the perception Durov fostered that he lived in conscientious exile from Putin’s Russia. According to iStories, an independent Russian news outlet, which recently analyzed leaked Federal Security Service (FSB) data on border crossings, Durov in fact entered Russia 41 times between 2015 and late 2017. (Irina Bolgar, Durov’s then partner, confirmed to WIRED that he was frequently with her and their children in St. Petersburg throughout this time; their relationship was not public.)
Eventually, though, Durov’s claims about operating Telegram in defiance of the Kremlin became a problematic reality. In July 2017, the FSB sent Telegram an order to hand over encryption keys for a half-dozen accounts “suspected of terrorism-related activities.” Durov’s company refused, claiming end-to-end encryption (which applied only to “secret chats”) prevented it from complying. Telegram’s stance suddenly put its employees in Russia—including Durov—at personal risk from the Kremlin. He needed safe harbors for himself and his company to live and operate in. (While WIRED previously reported that Telegram staff were working in St. Petersburg until at least 2017, Spurgeon said that the company “has never legally or physically been connected to Russia.”)
Durov also needed money. How much would it cost to cover Telegram’s operating expenses as the messenger kept growing? “About $620 million,” Durov estimated in a document he shared with potential investors in 2017, which later came out as part of a US Securities and Exchange Commission investigation. In late 2017, news leaked that Telegram was reportedly getting ready to launch its own cryptocurrency on a bespoke blockchain. Investing opened in 2018, allowing people to buy into Durov’s latest vision: Their dollars now for his “Grams” later. The presale brought in $1.7 billion, about a quarter of which came from the US. Individual investors included Kremlin ally Roman Abramovich; former Russian government minister Mikhail Abyzov; London-based oligarch Said Gutseriev; Jan Marsalek, a fugitive tech executive from Austria later accused of being a Russian spy; and, as recently revealed by iStories, a company linked to mining in the Russian-occupied Donbas region of Ukraine. Weeks after the token presale ended, the Russian government officially blocked domestic internet users from accessing Telegram.
In reinforcing the story of Telegram’s opposition to the Kremlin, this provided a perfect context for Durov as he set about shoring up his connections in Europe. He reportedly visited the Élysée Palace to have lunch with Macron, where Macron suggested that Durov move Telegram to France and offered him French citizenship. An official who worked closely with Macron at the time told WIRED that the president may have seen Durov as a kind of “trophy” in the geopolitical contest with Putin’s Russia. (The president’s current international press adviser, Anastasia Colosimo, noted that Snap CEO Evan Spiegel was granted French citizenship around this time and that no deal was struck between Macron and Durov.)
As Telegram wooed European leaders, it also bent to European priorities. A month after Russia banned Telegram, the company finally took a seat at the EU Internet Forum, where it joined the Silicon Valley giants that had volunteered years earlier to actively cooperate on taking down dangerous content. The company also overhauled its privacy policy, removing the promise to users that it would “never share your data with anyone.”
Around this time, Durov appointed Telegram’s first dedicated head of external and government relations. Yulia Conley took the job. Born in Russia and raised partly in Michigan, she had a master’s degree in environmental science from Oxford and had previously worked for nine months at a UN sustainable development program in New York. Now, at age 23, she would be Telegram’s “frontline person” for communications on content moderation and requests from international agencies.
Under Conley’s tenure, Telegram’s relationship with law enforcement evolved to the point that Europol was routinely sending the company large datasets of content it wanted taken down—and Telegram was complying. Conley and some engineers from the company attended a so-called “action day” in the fall of 2018, hosted at Europol’s headquarters in the Hague. With law enforcement from six EU member states, they removed hundreds of items of “terrorist content” from the platform, including audio, video, and PDFs posted by ISIS and al Qaeda, along with the public channels that hosted them.
There was another action day the following year. Europol’s operations room was fully stacked with representatives from 27 member states, according to Stéphane Duguin, who worked at Europol and led the establishment of the forum. “Everyone was there,” he recalled to WIRED. They watched onscreen in real time as Telegram took down channels “one after the other.” In a press release at the time, Europol hailed Telegram’s content referral tools and automated detection systems. “Our engineers were producing models and automation tools like nobody else,” Conley told WIRED, despite “scarce resources.”
At the time, Duguin said, no other companies in the EU Internet Forum were cooperating on the scale that Telegram was. Duguin, who left Europol just a few days after this final successful action day, strongly implied that much of the relationship’s success was due to Conley. “She was really committed,” he says. “She can be proud. Because, honestly, it was not easy.”
While Conley was busy earning Telegram the goodwill of authorities in Europe and beyond, Durov was confronting another crisis, this time in the United States. In October 2019, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a complaint against Telegram, contending that the token presale had violated registration requirements. The SEC demanded that Durov return $1.2 billion to investors. Once he did that, Telegram would have to raise funds somewhere else.
Back in Russia, the Telegram ban had turned into something of a farce. Durov’s platform remained the most popular messaging app in the country, despite the Kremlin’s half-hearted attempts to build a firewall around it. In June 2020, the Russian government announced that it would unblock the app, having reached its own agreement with Telegram over terrorist content. (Telegram has denied to WIRED that any agreement with the Kremlin existed.) When the unblocking happened, Durov was once again poised to take advantage of the timing. Within a week, Telegram had signed a settlement with the SEC in which it agreed to pay back the $1.2 billion.
Durov began freely visiting Russia again after Telegram’s unblocking, according to the leaked FSB data on border crossings obtained by iStories. In the year that followed, 2021, Telegram raised $1.7 billion in bond sales. The company reportedly got help selling the bonds from VTB, a Russian bank that’s majority state-owned and has close ties to the Kremlin, as well as Russian investment firm Aton, which was founded by a former government aide. While Russian media reported that 50 percent of the bonds were sold to Russian and European investors, Spurgeon told WIRED that “Russian investors did not play a significant role.”
Also in 2021, Durov gained citizenship in France and the UAE. Having weathered public pressure from the Kremlin and western governments, and having found a temporary fix for Telegram’s financial stresses, he seemed to relax his attention toward content moderation issues. In 2021, Conley left her role at Telegram. Sources told WIRED that after she departed, the company was less proactive, and its cooperation with Europol and other authorities deteriorated. Telegram remained in the EU Internet Forum, but 2019’s action day would remain the high-water mark for taking down malicious content, according to Duguin. (Spurgeon disagreed with this characterization, saying Telegram has always processed all takedown requests it received.)
The case that culminated with Durov’s dramatic arrest on multiple charges began with a single investigation the previous winter. It was a covert operation pursuing a suspect on Telegram who investigators said had pressured underage girls to send him child sexual abuse material and had admitted on the platform to raping a young girl. According to a document seen by Politico.eu, when investigators made a request to Telegram to reveal the suspect’s identity, the company refused.
De Roeck, the prosecutor’s office spokesperson, confirmed to WIRED that investigators requested help from Telegram to identify the suspect. She also noted that Telegram was not responding to requests from other police departments. “If it was one, we wouldn’t think anything about Telegram,” de Roeck explained. “But the point is, it’s every time, for every kind of request, in every country that we ask.” She added: “We’re not here to judge him right now. We’re here to ask: ‘Were you aware? Did you agree? What did you agree?’ Because it was not just once. It was thousands of times.” That March, according to documents reviewed by Politico.eu, arrest warrants went out for both Durov and Telegram’s other longest-serving officer, his brother Nikolai.
As the French investigation proceeded in secret, Durov was emerging from a long period out of the public eye. In April, he granted his first video interview in eight years—an hour-long sit-down with Tucker Carlson. Presenting himself as a champion of unfettered online expression, Durov praised Elon Musk for making X “more pro-freedom of speech.” (Musk replied to a clip of the interview: “Cool.”)
Later that month, Durov made his first onstage appearance in a decade. He was promoting TON, a successor to the crypto project the SEC had shut down in 2020. Officially, the new TON wasn’t run by Telegram, but Durov had been endorsing it, and anyone on the platform could activate a dedicated crypto wallet with a few clicks and start trading Toncoin. Now he was touting a new partnership with Tether, the company behind USDT, one of the most-traded cryptocurrencies in the world. By the end of April, Toncoin was worth more than double what it had been at the start of the year.
While Durov courted Carlson and hawked Toncoin, the French investigation into Telegram was escalating. By July 2024, it had grown to encompass a broad range of crimes, and France’s specialized anti-cybercrime unit, known as J3, took charge. Led by 39-year-old Johanna Brousse, this was the same small office that in 2021 had helped take down Sky ECC, an encrypted phone service used by organized crime for drug trafficking, buying weapons, extortion, and hiring hitmen. (Brousse declined to comment on either the Sky ECC case or Durov’s case, noting that both are still open.)
Durov spent most of that summer traveling around Central Asia with a 24-year-old self-described gamer and crypto enthusiast named Julia Vavilova. Vavilova uploaded pictures and videos to her social media accounts of helicopter rides, visits to nature parks, flights on a private jet, and stays in exclusive villas. On the morning of August 24, Durov was pictured having breakfast with Vavilova in Baku. They each appeared in videos at the same shooting range before they boarded the jet to Paris.
After Durov was arrested, one of the first questions among European journalists was whether the EU would piggyback on France’s case and seek to fine Telegram under its Digital Services Act. The law, which took effect a year earlier, holds platforms that operate in the EU legally responsible for users’ criminal activity, hate speech, and disinformation. “Very large online platforms”—those with at least 45 million users in the EU—face tougher obligations and penalties. So far the law had resulted in high-profile probes into X and public spats with Elon Musk. Telegram had avoided more serious scrutiny by claiming it was under the “very large” threshold. EU regulators were unconvinced and had begun an investigation into its user numbers.
A WIRED analysis with app growth expert Thomas Petit found that Telegram was very likely to have more than 45 million users in the bloc. Data that Petit accessed from Sensor Tower found 50 million monthly active users, and that was excluding some smaller countries for which there was no data. “Sensor Tower also tends to underestimate monthly active users,” Petit said. He put “the real figure” at 75 million or more. The ongoing probe into Telegram’s user base meant that the company was likely to have faced severe pressure to change its approach to moderation anyway.
In Durov’s first post on his Telegram channel after making bail, he said that blaming a CEO for users’ crimes was “misguided.” His interviews with police were “surprising,” he said, because Telegram had an official representative in the EU who responded to requests. At the same time, Durov acknowledged “growing pains” owing to the “abrupt increase” to 950 million global users, which had made it easier for criminals to abuse the platform. “I hope that the events of August will result in making Telegram—and the social networking industry as a whole—safer and stronger,” he wrote.
Durov took further steps in a post the next day, announcing the removal of a feature called “people nearby” that had supposedly been abused by scammers. He also disabled new media uploads to Telegra.ph, a blogging platform that authorities around Europe say had hosted illegal content, especially CSAM. Soon afterward he announced that “a dedicated team of moderators, leveraging AI,” would monitor Telegram’s in-app search tool to prevent discovery of certain kinds of malicious content. Telegram also quietly updated its privacy policy. The earlier language had said that Telegram might share data with legal authorities if they identified a user as a “terror suspect.” The new language broadened that to include anyone suspected of “criminal activities.”
“It’s night and day,” a Gendarmerie officer told WIRED. The officer, who investigates cybercrime but is not directly involved in Durov’s case, said that compliance from Telegram with metadata requests was helping with numerous investigations, especially drug trafficking. The Belgian prosecutor’s office told Libération that they had noticed improved cooperation from Telegram too. In fact, regulators as far afield as South Korea have been saying the same. Soyoung Park, who works for the country’s independent media commission, told WIRED that prior to Durov’s arrest, referring illegal content to the company felt like yelling into the void. But then, late last year, Park said, she met with a high-ranking executive in Japan. (Telegram vice president Ilya Perekopsky, who was in Tokyo around the same time, did not reply to WIRED’s requests for comment. Park declined to confirm the identity of the employee.) Now, Park said, her contacts at Telegram “not only remove the flagged content but provide us with compliance updates, typically within an average of 24 hours … And I think that’s, you know, a pretty big deal.”
Durov’s case in France won’t go to trial for a year or more, de Roeck, the prosecutor’s office spokesperson, told me. She added that it’s too early to discuss any kind of settlement agreement. For now, Durov is stuck in France, and his company seems to be in a kind of limbo, waiting to find out if a leader who has positioned himself as irreplaceable will need to be replaced.
What’s the mood inside Telegram? Current employees weren’t willing to comment. Shortly after WIRED contacted the company’s creative director for this story, he posted a cartoon that implied an internal attitude of defiance: A black-armored Durov stands in front of the Eiffel Tower, repelling waves of riot police who have “Thinkpol” emblazoned on their backs, while Macron looks on, clutching a red-bound copy of 1984. That seems to be how Durov continues to see himself and his company. The day after Zuckerberg announced Meta’s new moderation policies, Durov posted: “I’m proud that Telegram has supported freedom of speech long before it became politically safe to do so. Our values don’t depend on US electoral cycles.” He added: “It’s easy to say you support something when you risk nothing.” Elon Musk replied on X: “Good for you.” Durov wrote back: “I’m sure you can relate.”
Spurgeon, who joined Telegram shortly before the US presidential election, told WIRED that the company is now profitable, which she attributed to its monetization efforts, including 12 million premium subscriptions and an uptick in advertising revenue. In 2024, Spurgeon said, the company brought in $1 billion in revenue. A source familiar with Telegram’s financials told WIRED that more than half of this came from its ad platform. The company also unloaded Toncoin holdings valued at more than $244 million, according to documents obtained by the Financial Times. “It’s not like we’re using crypto to become profitable,” Spurgeon told WIRED.
The case against Durov has apparently done nothing to dampen Telegram’s growth, especially in the US. In the days after his capture, it briefly held the number two spot in the social networking category on Apple’s US App Store. Thomas Petit told WIRED that Sensor Tower data ranks the US as Telegram’s fifth biggest market, with at least 15 million monthly active users—and as with the EU, Petit estimates the real figure to be higher. The platform remains especially popular among far-right and pro-Trump groups. Telegram’s channels and secret chats are set to remain vital tools as these groups coordinate their activity. Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told WIRED: “Vigilantism is my primary concern.”
Among investors—arguably Durov’s most important constituency—questions over the company’s long-term future remain. Even before the arrest, many had concerns about the platform’s reputation for enabling criminal activity and extremist violence. Some prospective investors told WIRED they worried about being able to call in their debt if Durov went rogue: “If it’s just him in Dubai with 50 engineers, it’s going to be really difficult for us to enforce on this,” one analyst remembers thinking when his credit investment firm briefly considered Telegram bonds. Another question was uppermost in the minds of several potential investors: What happens to Telegram if Durov is gone for good?
Yulia Conley, who is now launching an education tech and mental health startup, sees this as a reset moment for the company. She stressed that the AI systems Durov has touted still require human experts to interpret context. What does “prioritizing speech” look like when you’re trying to decide if a right-wing militia member is inciting violence or just expressing an extreme anti-immigrant opinion? As of late last year, Telegram claimed to have about 750 content moderators on contract. (The company would not specify what the number of moderators was prior to then.) Conley says Durov’s first statements after the arrest gave her a feeling of cautious optimism. “OK, he’s got it,” she remembers telling herself. “Hopefully. Hopefully everything will be fine.’”
Additional reporting by Gabriel Thierry
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