2 weeks Ago By Simone Lobo
Explainer Briefly Slides The Madras High Court has directed social media platform, Telegram, to block and delete channels and chatbots impersonating fintech app PhonePe, in an interim order dated October 30. The digital payments company had filed a suit against Telegram claiming that the platform hosted several channels that redirected payments meant for PhonePe towards scammers. PhonePe claimed that this caused it monetary damages.
Telegram claimed that it was difficult for them to identify and block such accounts even during their early activity on the platform. The online messaging company said that it would block such content immediately if PhonePe informed them when scammers made such postings on its platform.PhonePe stated that it would inform Telegram of these accounts through email as and when it comes to their notice.
Justice K Kumaresh Babu directed Telegram to block the I.P. address of the URl of that PhonePe flagged.
Legal and regulatory action taken against Telegram Various entities have flagged their concerns about criminal networks and channels on Telegram. Recently, insurance provider Star Health suffered a data breach wherein hacker group, operating under the alias xenZen , created chatbots on Telegram providing random samples from the database it allegedly obtained from Star Health. They also offered to sell all the data for $150,000 on the platform.
The insurer filed a complaint with the Madras High Court against Telegram for hosting the chatbots in September. Telegram has also been under regulatory scrutiny globally for hosting cybercriminal groups on its platform. Notably, founder, Pavel Durov, was arrested by French authorities over a police investigation into criminal networks operating on the platform and for refusing to communicate documents/information necessary for intercepting illegal activities.
The Indian government is also investigating the company for extortion and gambling. Previously, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) had issued a notice to Telegram in October 2023 to take down Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) from their platform. Similarly, in 2019, South Korean authorities discovered an online gang that had blackmailed 70 women into taking explicit images of themselves and sold them on Telegram chat rooms.
Actions Telegram has taken Since Durov’s arrest, Telegram has made few changes in their content moderation systems. It has added a button to report illegal content to moderators and is using artificial intelligence (AI) to identify and restrict illegal content in Telegram Search. The social media platform also committed to sharing a user’s phone number and IP address with judicial authorities if it receives an order confirming that the user is a suspect in a criminal case that violates the platform’s terms of service.
It said that it would conduct a legal analysis before sharing the user’s data, and would reveal such occurrences in a quarterly transparency report. Also Read:.
