How to get leaked content removed from Telegram

01What Telegram actually removes

Telegram's Terms of Service prohibit posting illegal pornographic content on publicly viewable channels and bots, promoting violence, spam and scams, and activities recognised as illegal in the majority of countries. Its EU guidance sets the categories out more explicitly and includes the non-consensual publication of sexual materials.

The Safety page reports 28,519,174 groups and channels blocked in 2026, of which 464,799 were CSAM-related, and states that CSAM is matched against a hash database including hashes from the Internet Watch Foundation. Those figures describe volume, not your case.

02Public, private and cloud chats

The decisive sentence in the Telegram FAQ is this: private groups and chats are private amongst their participants, and Telegram does not process any requests related to them. If the material sits in a closed group or a one-to-one chat, a takedown report is not the mechanism.

Cloud chats matter for a second reason. Telegram states that cloud chat data sits in data centres under different legal entities in different jurisdictions, with decryption keys stored separately, so that several court orders from different jurisdictions would be needed to compel disclosure.

03The report routes that exist

Four routes are published and they are not interchangeable. The in-app report reaches moderation fastest, the email addresses create a written record, @TIDABot is the route built for non-consensual intimate images, and the EU route carries procedural rights the others do not.

• The Telegram FAQ names @NoToScam where an account impersonates you, which is the route when a channel uses your name or photographs to run a scam.
• The Safety page names @SearchReport for search terms leading to illegal content in your country.

04Documenting a channel properly

A report saying there is a video of me on this channel is closed as unactionable. Telegram asks for links like t.me or the @username so moderators can locate the content, and the EU route asks for a clear explanation of why it is illegal. A channel can also be renamed or emptied before the review.

05What changed after August 2024

Telegram's founder Pavel Durov was detained near Paris on 24 August 2024 and placed under formal investigation four days later by the Paris prosecutor's office, on counts including complicity in running a platform allowing illicit transactions, child sexual abuse imagery and refusal to communicate information to authorities. He was released on 5 million euros bail.

What matters for a removal request is the policy movement that followed. Telegram widened the prohibited-use list to activities recognised as illegal in the majority of countries, rewrote the disclosure clause in its Privacy Policy, moved transparency reporting to a quarterly cycle, and built a dedicated bot for non-consensual intimate images.

06Disclosure of data to authorities

Section 8.3 of the Telegram Privacy Policy, last updated 23 September 2024, states that on a valid order from the relevant judicial authorities confirming you are a suspect in a case involving criminal activities that violate the Terms of Service, Telegram may disclose your IP address and phone number. The earlier wording was limited to a terror suspect.

The scale of the change shows in the figures. Telegram's transparency data for 2024 records 900 occasions on which it supplied phone numbers and IP addresses to United States authorities, affecting 2,253 users. The FAQ still states it has disclosed 0 bytes of user messages: the clause covers identifiers, not content.

07The DSA position in the EU

The Digital Services Act, Regulation (EU) 2022/2065, entered into force on 16 November 2022 and has applied to all in-scope services since 17 February 2024. Telegram publishes EU user guidance under it, and that guidance forms part of its Terms of Service for users in the EU.

• Telegram states that as of August 2026 the parts of its service that may qualify as online platforms had significantly fewer than 45 million average monthly active recipients in the EU, below the very large online platform threshold.
• The DSA requires notice and action mechanisms that are easy to find and use, a decision communicated to the notifier without undue delay, and reasons with redress options when content is restricted.
• The European Digital Services Representative in Brussels is Telegram's Article 13 representative, but that channel is reserved for authorities, not individual complainants.
• For users, Telegram names the @EURegulation bot as its point of contact and links a dedicated report page, which at the date checked resolves to the Telegram homepage. File the in-app report as well and keep a timestamped copy of your notice.

Filing as a DSA notice is worth the effort in one respect. Telegram states you will be asked for your name, contact information and a clear explanation of why the content is illegal, and that insufficient reports may be dismissed. That notice is also the document you hand to a Digital Services Coordinator.

08UK and US duties on Telegram

A request under the US statute must be in writing with a signature, identify the depiction and give information reasonably sufficient to locate it, state a good faith belief that it is non-consensual, and include contact details. The Federal Trade Commission enforces a failure to comply as an unfair or deceptive practice.

The Ofcom investigation is useful to know and a poor thing to rely on: it concerns CSAM systems rather than your individual item, and Ofcom has said only that it will update in due course.

09Hash registration and search removal

A report removes a copy at an address you already know. A hash is a fingerprint computed from your own file that participating services match against new uploads, including copies you have never seen. StopNCII.org, run by the Revenge Porn Helpline at SWGfL, generates the hash on your device and does not download your images.

• You must be the person depicted, have been 18 or over when the material was made, be over 18 now, still hold the file, and be nude, semi-nude or engaged in a sexual act in it.
• The participating companies include Facebook, Instagram, Microsoft, TikTok, Reddit, Snap, X, OnlyFans, Pornhub and xVideos.
• Telegram is not on that list. A hash does not stop uploads to Telegram; it blocks the file where the material travels next.

Search removal is a separate action again. Google operates a policy covering real sexual content, Deepfake and other fabricated sexual imagery in which you are identifiable, and pages wrongly linking your name to pornographic sites. Google states it can only remove content from search results pages, not from the hosting site.

10The mirror problem

Removal on Telegram alone never ends distribution. Material that reaches a public channel has usually already been exported, and the structure makes that cheap: forwarding is one tap, a channel can be cloned under a new username in minutes, and bots can rebroadcast a file automatically.

• Clone channels appear under near-identical usernames, built from the same words as the original.
• Channel-directory and mirror sites republish public channel content outside Telegram, and those pages are the ones that surface in search. They need their own host and search reports.
• A file that left Telegram turns up on tube sites and forums, where a registered hash and a host complaint are the working tools.
• Keep the hash registered permanently. It is the only mechanism acting on copies you have not found.

11Working order

1. Capture the record for every channel, group or bot, including message-level links.
2. File the in-app report on each post, then send the same list to abuse@telegram.org.
3. File the @TIDABot request where the material is a non-consensual intimate image of you.
4. In the EU, file as a DSA notice with your name, contact details and reasons.
5. Register the hash with StopNCII if you are eligible.
6. File the Google Search removal request for the mirror and directory pages.
7. Escalate surviving mirrors to their own hosts, registrars and CDNs.
8. Monitor the identifiers and captions you recorded, and re-file against clones.

Report to police where there is a threat, extortion, a minor depicted, or an identifiable uploader who continues after notice. Instruct a lawyer where you need a disclosure order, an order against an unresponsive host, or a damages claim. SARAZIM LLC handles the administrative side above and does not practise law.