In the first half of this year, the number of scam cases perpetrated on Telegram was up 137.5 per cent compared with the same period last year.
Of the 8,336 scam cases where criminals contacted victims via messaging apps, 45 per cent used Telegram, according to the police’s mid-year brief.
Those personally affected by scammers may have found it difficult to get support from Telegram.
Mr Robin Hicks, who works as an editor, started getting messages last month from people saying he was on Telegram, or at least someone using his phone number was.
“What’s interesting was that the avatar that they used to present themselves as me was a different gender. It was a young woman,” he said.
The scammer, masquerading as Mr Hicks, approached people – including his business contacts – claiming he was in a tight financial situation and asked to borrow money.
After finding out about the scam, Mr Hicks tried to gain control of the account, but failed because login codes are sent to the account rather than via SMS.
He asked his friends who use Telegram to report the account and he also emailed the platform to take down the account.
In his email, he included screenshots of the fake account and conversations between the scammer and his contacts.
But he didn’t get a response from Telegram.
“There wasn’t even an automated response to say, hey, we’re looking into it,” he said. “Nothing at all.”
The person pretending to be him continued to engage with his contacts for about a week or two.
“Thankfully, a lot of the contacts realised it was a hoax or a scam account because it so obviously wasn’t me,” he said, adding that there were Finnish words used in the biography of the account linked to his number.
“I think it would have been more of an issue if they used, say, a picture from my LinkedIn account or another social media account.”
Still, it was stressful not to hear back from Telegram, especially since the scammer had reached out to his work contacts.
“It was fairly obvious it’s a scammer, but if (the picture used) was more similar to me, it could have been potentially career wrecking.”
More than a month later, he still has not heard anything from Telegram. He only found out the account was gone because some friends helped to check on it.
Ms Gabrielle See, Mr Hicks’ colleague and a long-time user of Telegram, said she expected the app to respond to such requests more quickly.
“My impression of (Telegram) is that it was very focused on security and its users. I think I just expected it to do better – at least better than WhatsApp,” said Ms See.
Anecdotally, she said WhatsApp seems to respond to scam groups quite quickly, sometimes even before she reports them.
When Ms See first started using Telegram, she felt that it was proactive in communicating with its audience and that it regularly rolled out new features for its users.
Mr Hicks’ experience has caused her to lose some of her appreciation for Telegram.