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NOS Nieuws•vandaag, 06:06
Drug criminals can operate undisturbed on the Telegram chat app. In public chats with thousands of members, millions of messages are published in which soft drugs, hard drugs and hard drugs are offered for sale. Accounts and groups sometimes remain active for years.
Drugs can be found with simple search terms, according to an analysis of NOS using an AI model. The quantities offered vary from a few grams to many kilos. Last year alone, 2.5 million messages offering drugs were posted, NOS noted.
The huge amount of drug advertising gives the impression that Telegram almost never intervenes. The police also say so: they say they receive little cooperation from the company.
Telegram tells NOS that this occurs. “Since our inception, we have moderated harmful messages, including the sale of narcotics,” a company spokesperson said. Telegram says it responds to user complaints and also does its own “proactive monitoring.” Police say they didn’t notice him.
Illegal business
The 2.5 million 2023 drug ads were placed in 21 different chat groups. These groups focus on selling drugs and other illegal items, such as heavy fireworks and supplies for Internet scams.
Hard drugs such as cocaine and ecstasy are the most popular, but synthetic drugs such as the now banned 3-MMC are also widely available.
NOS op 3 spoke to a reseller who trades on Telegram. You can see it in this video:
The world of drug dealing on Telegram
In the groups studied the same advertising messages are often repeated, sometimes even thousands of times. In total, the NOS detected nearly 55,000 unique drug ads published in 2023.
According to the NOS analysis the suppliers are active throughout the Netherlands: from Schiermonnikoog and the north of North Holland to Zeeuws-Vlaanderen. They list in detail the locations where they deliver, probably to be easy to find when users enter their place of residence into Telegram’s search function.
It is impossible to say whether all the suppliers – 9,900 in total – actually sell drugs. Scammers who take money from their “customers” without ever delivering anything are also active on Telegram.
Advertising channel
The thirteen suppliers who wanted to speak to NOS said they actually sell drugs. For them, Telegram is primarily an important advertising channel and an accessible way to acquire new customers. After the first contact, some sellers switch to other, often more secure chat applications, such as WhatsApp, Signal or Wickr.
How does Telegram work?
Telegram is an originally Russian chat app with over 700 million users worldwide and 1.7 million in the Netherlands. He says he is in Dubai now. You can exchange messages, photos and videos, individually or in groups.
One difference with WhatsApp, for example, is that groups are often accessible to everyone. Anyone who wants can join a group where drugs are offered and contact a drug dealer there. Groups on Telegram can also be many times larger than those on WhatsApp. It makes Telegram a major advertising channel for drug trafficking and other illegal activities.
Some suppliers specialize in a certain type of medication. For example, they only have weed, cocaine or synthetic drugs. There are also numerous advertisers offering a complete range, from ecstasy to coke, ketamine and heavy painkillers.
They often promise to put the customer first. Drugs can be tested first and those who are not satisfied will be refunded, according to many advertisements. They also promise “discreet deliverers”, who are often also “friendly and correct”.
See examples of drug ads on Telegram here:
While most providers sell quantities of users, the NOS has detected more than 800 accounts offering larger quantities. They offer weed by the kilo or ecstasy pills by the thousand.
Lively trade
According to cybercrime expert Rolf van Wegberg from TU Delft, trading on the dark web has largely moved to Telegram. “It all started around 2020, when several major dark web marketplaces were taken offline and flash delivery companies like Gorillas and Flink emerged,” says Van Wegberg.
Now drug buyers also expect this convenience, says Van Wegberg. “On the dark web it may take a while for you to receive the ecstasy pills you ordered in the mail; on Telegram you can find a drug dealer who is nearby and will deliver them to you very quickly.”
These drugs are most commonly offered:
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However, there are more risks for users. “There are more scams on Telegram and less certainty of getting what you buy,” says Van Wegberg. Dark web marketplaces allowed users to leave reviews; those who sold substandard things or didn’t deliver no longer attracted customers. “None of this is on Telegram.”
Make choices
The police also see the lively trade on Telegram, but are not sure whether it is really as large a traffic as the huge number of advertisements suggests.
According to the police, the fact that drug dealers advertise en masse does not mean that there is no control. “Just because you don’t see us doesn’t mean we’re not there,” says Nan van de Coevering of the police’s High Tech Crime Team. “But with such a broad offering, obviously we have to make choices.”
The police say they are mainly focusing on the main players, who are active on multiple platforms at the same time. For example, priority is also given to the arms trade.
What doesn’t help the police is that Telegram doesn’t cooperate. The platform usually ignores requests to provide information about suspicious users. They also don’t clean their platforms on their own initiative, notes Van de Coevering. “Telegram does not have self-cleaning capabilities.”
No action against Telegram
Yet the Dutch government takes no action against Telegram. Germany does it. There the company was fined and promised to cooperate better from then on. Telegram will also have to deal with stricter European rules.
Research conducted by NOS has previously shown that Telegram is unlikely to take action against so-called exposure groups, in which intimate images of women and their contact details are shared. Far-right groups are also active.
As long as you don’t sell weapons or women, they will leave you alone
Drug dealer on police
Despite Telegram’s lack of cooperation, police say they are not helpless. Drug dealers are occasionally arrested after undercover operations. Last year officers took control of a drugs channel for the first time, after which all members received a warning from the police.
Several sellers tell NOS that they are very wary of possible undercover agents. Although one of them thinks it won’t be that bad: “As long as you don’t sell weapons or women, they will leave you alone.”
Responsibility
For this story, NOS analyzed more than 5.6 million messages on Telegram, up to and including November 27. Using artificial intelligence models, we assessed whether there was advertising for the drugs, what type of drugs were sold, whether they were in large quantities and how the drugs reached the buyer (by mail, delivery or collection).
To train this model, we manually classified 5,185 messages from public and popular Telegram groups where business is transacted. We chose groups that were easy to find and relatively large; we did not enter closed groups.
This manual categorization was the input for two different so-called machine learning models. In the first case we investigated whether or not a message was a drug advertisement: the artificial intelligence model simply said “yes” or “no”.
We also used a template to add multiple categories to messages: not just whether something is a drug ad, but also what was sold and how. According to our tests, these models appear to be 97% and 96% reliable, respectively.
We then used both algorithms to automatically classify 5.6 million messages, and in both models we concluded that among those 5.6 million messages there were 2.8 million drug ads.
We’ve posted the model and a more detailed explanation on the Huggingface website. That website is intended for sharing artificial intelligence models.
2024-01-25 05:06:42
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