A look into Telegrams illicit drug-trade and its history.

For years now, telegram has been helping enable dark-net trade despite the high risks. Year over year, more illicit drug transactions are taking place on the platform. Popular but now shut-down telegram-shop service televend also made the headlines in recent years. This led to many asking question what about how telegram enables drug trades.

Telegrams History

Telegram is a very popular messaging service that operates from Russia. The platform was first launched by two brothers Nikolai and Pavel Durov in 2013. The platform gained steam in Russia fairly quickly, but started to gather international attention a few years down the line. Currently, Telegram has over 500 million active users each month. The company has had its fair share of roadblocks in the past but has experienced a huge wave of success in recent years.

Drug Trade on Telegram

Drug trade has been taking place on telegram for a very long time now. Initially it started with small scale vendors opening small shops, but that quickly started to change. A wave of vendors started to open shops on telegram in 2018. This wave inspired a popular service at the time, known as televend. Televend was a platform that allowed vendors to set up telegram shops via an online interface. The shops were automated and users could find them on televend itself. This was a popular idea at the time because of how common exit scams were. Despite that, televend was very short-lived, getting seized soon after.

Today many vendors still host independent telegram shop but is uncommon. This type of trade is more popular in eastern Europe and Russia. The popular blacksprut market allows vendors to host an automated telegram shop in case of downtime.

Scammers and Security concerns

As vendors started to flood telegram, so did scammers. Today there are more scammer on telegram than legitimate vendors. The only way to know if a vendor is real is by having them directly provide you the store name. Many argue that it is unwise to shop on telegram. The main reason is that encryption is not enabled by default. Authorities are also likely to have access to all of the information from the platform.

Conclusion

Telegram has seen a massive rise in drug trade over the years. This comes as no surprise as many other platforms have experienced similar effects. Instagram is a very notable example, with a large number of US drug trade taking place there. We do not recommend anyone use a messaging app for illicit drug trade as there are too many potential flaws in that process.