Access on the tarmac: French security forces arrested Pawel Durov, founder and head of the chat app Telegram, at Le Bourget airport in Paris on Saturday evening after he landed on a private jet. Since the emergence of messenger and social media platforms, there has been no known case in which Western authorities have arrested the operator of a service used by millions.
However, the French authorities took their time to explain or even confirm the arrest. An official statement on the arrest was released as late as Monday afternoon.
The National Cybercrime Unit and the Anti-Fraud Office are investigating Durov, a police spokesperson said. He is accused of failing to cooperate in cases of online crime and financial crimes that took place on Telegram.
French President Emmanuel Macron wrote on X that Durov had been arrested as part of legal proceedings and that it was “in no way a political decision”.
Telegram was also said to be doing too little in the area of content moderation and cooperating insufficiently with the authorities. The police are also apparently accusing Durov of glorifying terrorism. The terrorism offence would allow the authorities to detain the Telegram boss for 96 hours without charge. This four-day period ends on Wednesday evening. Durov's interrogation is still ongoing, according to reports.
Pressure on Telegram has also increased at EU level in recent months. However, according to a spokesperson, the EU Commission was not involved in Durov's arrest.
The strictest requirements of the DSA only apply to large online platforms, so-called VLOPs with more than 45 million users. Telegram claimed in February that it only had 41 million users in the EU.
By comparison, X has around 360 million users worldwide and more than 130 million in the EU.
Who is Pavel Durov
In December 2011, Russia experienced the largest anti-Kremlin protests since the end of the Soviet Union. 10,000 people also demonstrated in Durov's hometown of St. Petersburg against election fraud and Putin's return to the presidency.
At the time, Durov was still head of the social network VKontakte, his Russian copycat of Facebook, which had more than 100 million users at the time. The fact that opposition groups were calling for demonstrations via the network displeased the Russian government. The FSB domestic intelligence service ordered Durov to close the groups. Instead of complying with the order, he published the letter from the intelligence service on Twitter. Three days later, armed members of the Omon special police were at the door of his apartment. “They seemed to want to break the door,” Durov later recalled in an interview with the New York Times. He watched the officers through the monitor of his intercom system and did not open the door. After an hour, they disappeared.
Since then, Durov has been largely unreachable, just like the Telegram team. 25 to 30 people reportedly work in Telegram's core team. Former employees who still have connections to the team confirm this; few names are public – for security reasons.
The investigation into Durov, who is critical of the state, is also likely to focus on “Ton”. Telegram users can use the Ton coin to buy various things directly on the platform, such as vanity usernames, and the service also gives channel operators a share of the advertising revenue. In the meantime, the Ton Coin has risen to the top ten of all cryptocurrencies – and the Durov brothers have effectively achieved what Mark Zuckerberg failed to do with his Diem project.
Over the weekend, however, it became clear that the markets also find it implausible that Durov's fate is not closely intertwined with Ton. Immediately after news of Durow's arrest made the rounds, the value of the coin plummeted by almost 20 percent.
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