Telegram CEO allowed to leave France amid investigation
Telegram CEO Pavel Durov has returned home to Dubai, he said Monday, seven months after being arrested in France over charges that the platform was being used for criminal activity.
'I've returned to Dubai after spending several months in France due to an investigation related to the activity of criminals on Telegram. The process is ongoing, but it feels great to be home,' Durov posted to his Telegram channel Monday.
A spokesperson for the Paris Prosecutor's office told NBC News that Durov remains under investigation.
'I want to thank the investigative judges for letting this happen, as well as my lawyers and team for their relentless efforts in demonstrating that, when it comes to moderation, cooperation, and fighting crime, for years Telegram not only met but exceeded its legal obligations,' Durov said.
Durov, an enigmatic Soviet-born tech entrepreneur who has long claimed to be a champion of free speech, was arrested in Paris in August. The Paris prosecutor's office said he had been detained as part of a larger investigation into the platform's 'complicity' in alleged crimes related to child sex abuse material (CSAM), among other accusations.
Last fall, after being released by law enforcement but required to stay in France, Durov announced plans to ' significantly improve ' Telegram's response to criminals who abuse the platform.
Headquartered in Dubai, Telegram is rare among global social media platforms for not having overt ties to either the U.S. or China. It's particularly popular in the Middle East, eastern Europe and Russia, and in recent years has also become popular among some in the American far-right.
Thanks to its history of explicitly avoiding moderation, which Durov has equated with censorship, Telegram has long attracted terrorists, cybercriminals and people who traffic in child sex abuse material.
As NBC News reported in August, Telegram was previously the only major social media platform to refuse to work with any of the major international child safety organizations to combat CSAM.
In December, Telegram announced that it partnered with the U.K.-based Internet Watch Foundation to automatically flag and remove that material.
Despite Durov's pledge to reduce abuse of his platform, it's still a preferred platform for some cybercriminals. An NBC News investigation into text-message scams last week found that Chinese-speaking cybercriminals who sell software to fake credit card payments routinely use Telegram to advertise.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
NBC News
21 minutes ago
- NBC News
Harvard gets new legal backing from 5 Ivies and over 12,000 alumni
Twenty four universities, including five Ivy League schools, and more than 12,000 alumni took measures to back Harvard University in its legal battle against the Trump administration, which has threatened it with slashing billions of dollars in grants. Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth, Brown and the University of Pennsylvania, along with several other schools, filed an amicus brief on Monday in support of the nation's oldest university, arguing that the funding freeze would impact more than just Harvard, due to the interconnectedness of scientific research, and would ultimately hinder American innovation and economic growth. Also on Monday, the group of 12,041 Harvard alumni filed a separate brief describing the withholding of funds as a 'reckless and unlawful' attempt to assert control over the school and other higher education institutions. 'The escalating campaign against Harvard threatens the very foundation of who we are as a nation,' the alumni said in the brief. 'We embrace our responsibility to stand up for our freedoms and values, to safeguard liberty and democracy, and to serve as bulwarks against these threats to the safety and well-being of all.' The amicus briefs aim to provide expertise or insight to the court, but the schools and individuals are not parties in the lawsuit itself. The filings come after Harvard in April rejected the government's list of 10 demands, including auditing viewpoints of the student body, a move that the administration says is aimed at addressing antisemitism on campus. After the government threatened to freeze $2.2 billion in multiyear grants and $60 million 'in multi-year contract value,' Harvard hit back with a lawsuit. The brief filed by the universities included other prominent institutions like Georgetown, Johns Hopkins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The only Ivy League schools missing were Cornell and Columbia universities. The schools argued that the partnership between the government and academia has long led to critical advancements, from the The Human Genome Project to the Covid-19 vaccine. And that funding cuts to one school could endanger research at others. Harvard, MIT and Princeton, for example, have received funding from the National Institutes of Health for a project that could potentially yield tools to treat Alzheimer's disease. 'The work cannot continue at individual sites; MIT cannot use machine learning to uncover patterns, for example, without data from Princeton and Harvard,' the brief said. The universities said in the brief that the cuts would only cause more harm to the United States' ability to compete in science and academia. 'These cuts to research funding risk a future where the next pathbreaking innovation — whether it is a cure for cancer or Alzheimer's, a military technology, or the next Internet — is discovered beyond our shores, if at all,' the brief said. Sally Kornbluth, president of MIT, said in a letter to the school's community that it was critical to make a legal argument against the funding cuts. 'Although the value to the public of federally funded university research feels obvious to us at MIT, we felt compelled to make the case for its countless benefits to the court and, in effect, to the American people,' Kornbluth said. The Harvard alumni filed their brief in support of the school's motion for a summary judgement submitted last week. If granted, the summary judgment would allow the court to decide the case without a full trial. The alumni, which include comedian Conan O'Brien, author Margaret E. Atwood and Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., wrote in the brief that the administration's 'end goal is to narrow our freedoms to learn, teach, think, and act, and to claim for itself the right to dictate who may enjoy those freedoms.' The alumni also slammed the administration's concerns over antisemitism as rationale over the funding freeze. 'We unequivocally condemn antisemitism and every other form of discrimination and hate, which have no place at Harvard or anywhere else in our society,' the alumni said in its brief. 'Yet charges of antisemitism — particularly without due process and proper bases and findings by the Government — should not be used as a pretext for the illegal and unconstitutional punishment and takeover of an academic institution by the Government.' The government's demands on Harvard, the alumni said in the brief, 'have little or nothing to do with combating antisemitism' or any other form of discrimination on campus. 'Rather, its demands stifle the very engagement, teaching, and research that bring communities together, heighten our understanding of one another, and advance solutions that directly benefit us all,' the brief said. The show of legal support comes amid a monthslong back-and-forth between the administration and Harvard University. Most recently, the school sued the administration after Trump issued a proclamation last week denying visas for foreign students trying to come to the U.S. to attend the prestigious school.
Belfast Telegraph
30 minutes ago
- Belfast Telegraph
Brother of Larne man missing since October says his remains have been found in Co Down river
Gary Patterson was last seen alive in his hometown of Larne in October of last year, after being reported missing by his family. The 45-year-old was caught on CCTV leaving his flat in Priory Gardens and withdrew £100 from a cash machine in the Co Antrim town on October 12 at 10.30am His disappearance sparked a multi-agency search operation with rivers, forests and the Larne Lough with his heartbroken brother, Simon Patterson, accepting they were 'looking for a body.' Remains that were subsequently discovered in a river Crawfordsburn near the Ballyrobert Road area on Saturday have been found to be that of Gary's. Speaking to the Belfast Telegraph, Simon expressed his relief at finding the body and said he received a call from the police detailing the remains were found alongside his brothers possessions. 'I first got the news on Sunday while we were doing a search and we received a phone call from police in CID [Criminal Investigation Department] asking them to come across to speak to us,' Simon said. 'There was that much information in the call [with the police], we sort of knew because the coat and his wallet had actually been found with the body. 'We're just going through the motions. Because we have known for a wee while, we've sort of contacted funeral homes and stuff to have ourselves organized whenever the body is released. 'At the end of the day, our priority is to get closure and get him laid to rest.' Throughout the months his brother was missing, Simon employed specialist diving squads with a submersible Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) to search enclaves in Larne Lough. Simon told this newspaper he had been conducting searches 'religiously' every week and pledged not to stop until his brother was found. Gary was described an avid collector of DVDs, quiet and 'a wee bit of a loner', by his brother. He was known to be proud of his flat where he lived alone and 'was set in his routine', usually returning home by 4pm. His distraught brother also labelled his sibling as a 'kind' man who 'never took a drink or drugs' and loved to frequent charity shops in his hometown. A spokesman from the PSNI said: 'A post-mortem has been carried out and our efforts are ongoing to identify the remains. We can provide no time scale for this process.'
Economist
an hour ago
- Economist
Factory work is overrated. Here are the jobs of the future
Trumpian types are unanimous: America needs factories. The president describes how workers have 'watched in anguish as foreign leaders have stolen our jobs, foreign cheaters have ransacked our factories and foreign scavengers have torn apart our once beautiful American dream'. Peter Navarro, his trade adviser, says that tariffs will 'fill up all of the half-empty factories'. Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, offers the most cartoonish pitch of all: 'The army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones—that kind of thing is going to come to America.'
