After spending 4 days in police custody, the founder and CEO of messaging app Telegram, Pavel Durov, was put beneath formal investigation in France on Thursday for a variety of legal fees.
He was additionally launched from custody on the situation that he doesn’t go away French territory in the course of the investigation. Bail was set at €5 million (round $5.6 million) and he should examine in at a police station twice per week.
On Tuesday, the court docket answerable for the investigation — the Paris legal court docket — shared an inventory of fees that led to Durov’s arrest on August 24 after he stepped off his non-public jet at France’s Le Bourget Airport.
The primary fees are accusations of working an organization that has been complicit in storing and distributing youngster sexual abuse materials (CSAM), facilitating drug trafficking and facilitating organized fraud and different unlawful transactions. He’s additionally dealing with fees regarding registration of Telegram’s cryptographic options, amongst different legal complaints.
In a assertion, Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau confirmed all the fees and stated the investigation is transferring ahead. The very fact of Durov being positioned beneath formal investigation means he’s formally suspected of what he’s been accused of.
Within the French judicial system being positioned beneath formal investigation is a mandatory procedural step with a purpose to take a case to trial. Nevertheless it doesn’t imply a trial is definite. If authorities determine they don’t have a powerful sufficient case the investigation might be shelved earlier than it will get to court docket. However the step means there’s a considerable cause to pursue a probe.
The prosecutor’s assertion (which we’ve translated from French) summarizes why Durov ended up in police custody, with Beccuau writing that Telegram “seems in a number of circumstances involving varied offenses (youngster pornography, trafficking, on-line hate speech)”.
“Telegram’s nearly whole failure to answer judicial requests was dropped at the eye of the cybercrime part (J3) of the organized crime nationwide court docket (JUNALCO) inside the Paris public prosecutor’s workplace, specifically by the nationwide workplace for minors (OFMIN),” she additionally wrote.
“When consulted, different French investigation departments and public prosecutors’ places of work, in addition to varied Eurojust companions, notably Belgian, shared the identical remark. This led JUNALCO to open an investigation into the potential legal duty of the executives of this messaging service in these offenses,” Beccuau added.
Subsequent to this — again in February 2024 — the Paris court docket opened a preliminary investigation and put OFMIN answerable for the probe. The Centre for the Combat in opposition to Cybercrime (C3N) and the Anti-Fraud Nationwide Workplace (ONAF) later took over the investigation.
This account seems to substantiate reporting by Politico that stated Durov’s issues began with a separate investigation centered on youngster intercourse abuse. In keeping with Politico reporters, who had been in a position to seek the advice of paperwork from that investigation, a suspect advised investigators they used Telegram to lure underaged women into sending “self-produced youngster pornography.” They then threatened to launch the CSAM on social media.
It additionally reported that as a part of this case French authorities despatched a request to Telegram to determine the suspect. However the firm ignored the request — resulting in a preliminary investigation into its unwillingness to cooperate with regulation enforcement on a legal matter.
Telegram didn’t reply to a request for remark about Durov’s arrest and the fees he’s dealing with.
Lack of content material moderation
Whereas the case in opposition to Telegram was sparked by a CSAM investigation it turned extra substantial in the course of the preliminary investigation as French authorities began trying into the messaging app’s actions extra broadly.
Telegram at present has 950 million month-to-month lively customers and few moderation instruments and processes. In an interview with Tucker Carlson, Durov claimed solely 30 engineers work on the social app. So, along with the corporate’s unwillingness to cooperate with regulation enforcement authorities, the Paris court docket is basically claiming Telegram’s (lack of) moderation permits the sharing of CSAM, drug trafficking and fraudulent actions to happen on the platform.
“It’s utterly absurd to assert that the top of a social platform might be answerable for legal acts that don’t contain him, both instantly or not directly,” David-Olivier Kaminski, a lawyer working for Durov, advised reporters on Wednesday evening native time, per Le Monde.
However that line of protection doesn’t clarify why Telegram ignored the regulation enforcement request within the first place.
Furthermore, Durov can be being charged with cash laundering. This might be associated to Telegram’s cryptocurrency-related options and failing to observe “Know Your Buyer” necessities.
Telegram has a digital foreign money referred to as Stars that can be utilized to purchase digital content material from different customers. Stars will also be transformed to Toncoin, a cryptocurrency backed by Telegram which will be traded on varied crypto exchanges and transferred to a checking account.
As this can be a wide-ranging case, the investigation is prone to final a number of months at the least. It may even take greater than a 12 months. Durov can be anticipated to stay in France for the period.
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