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 on 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 United States 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.

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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.

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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.