Are the telegram bots safe

It really depends on who developed them and for what purpose. We’ve heard about telegram bots trying to intercept messages from the groups and people owning them reading through the messages or even selling information about the users. Luckily for you - we are in the business of security and believe in freedom of expression. The sole purpose of our bot is to fight with spammers and make your life as a group administrator or owner easier by providing the service which operates 24/7.

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Do you store message data?

Things which we store temporarily are messages sent within the groups. They are stored for up to 24 hours for analytical purposes - that’s how the artificial intelligence of our bot learns how to recognise spam. We do not intend to store them for more than this period because it’s not only slowing the database down but is also really expensive with this amount of traffic. Only messages which are stored indefinitely are those which were punished - you can see them in the administrator panel of your group under the “penalties” section. They are used for calculations of the account being the spammer probability as well and of course - teaching the bot how to recognise unwanted messages.

Do you store user data?

We temporarily cache user profile details. We scan profile pictures for the presence of any adult materials. We also check the profile description for any invitation links which could be considered harmful. Thanks to this, you as administrator can have a full overview of users joining your group together with basic information about them calculated from their profile. It’s the same information you would see if you’d tap on their profile name and check the details in the Telegram Application.

Do you contact users?

No, and we will never approach you first. We dislike spamming so much that if you have a problem with our bot you need to come to us. The safest way to do it is to visit the support group using the “contact” link at the bottom of this page. Anyone else who approaches you as our staff member is a scammer and you should be careful with any conversation.

How do I find out if the bot is safe?

When the bot joins your group either by your invitation or one of the users bringing it in, check the list of the group users in the Telegram application. Bots which you do not recognise and have “has access to messages” could be potentially dangerous. Our bot has access to the messages because it needs to filter them, but for example, the bot which was added to search for gifs does not need such access. You need to use common sense to make a judgement. Our advice is - if something feels odd - it most likely is.

Examples of potential red flags

During the research we found that some of the most popular telegram bots could be potentially unsafe and we’d be really careful in using them. Here’s an example of the “unknown” player which appeared out of nowhere to storm the first spot on practically all the telegram bot related searches.

Let’s have a look at the wayback machine first. From the screenshot above you can figure out that website was first time seen at the end of 2018. It pretty much has not changed since then. No new content or functions were added and everything stays frozen in time and with ongoing changes with both - Telegram API and Google Search algorithms - it could be considered a bit weird.

This is a screenshot from one of the SEO analysis tools which we use to find the ways to reach new users. As you can see - the massive advertisement campaign for the mentioned suspicious bot started mid 2019, to see the first effects from September that year onwards. Technically there’s nothing wrong with building the backlinks to ensure that Google indexes your website. The massive red flag in that case is their number. We see 1.2 million backlinks pointing to that website which guaranteed them first place in Google search results for all the keywords included. Even with cheapest backlink building solutions ( like peopleperhour or fiverr ) this would be an extremely expensive operation, with minimum cost closing within few hundred thousands dollars.

Third red flag is the address of the creators which points towards Singapore. During recent problems with concerns around TikTok and China or rather Chinese government having an easy access to the users data we have asked ourselves few questions which you also should think about. Our trail of thoughts was - if bot appears out of nowhere, gets an incredible advertisement budget / work done around it and remains stale afterwards - who reads the messages from your groups?

Can I use bot on my group?

Of course you can! We strongly believe internet should be a place for everyone to express themselves and it’s only a matter of deciding if you’d like to see certain content or not - it is your choice. Otherwise - wherever you are from the political left or right, you want to praise or condemn your government or you want to run legitimate business group or not - you can use our bot. We are not here to tell you off or prohibit you from using our service as it is. We are here to help you and to make your life easier and spam free. If you have any further questions, please visit the support group.

The only groups and content which bot will actively fight against is distribution of CSAM.