# Telegram OSINT: what is public, what the tools reach, and what survives deletion

Last verified: 9 September 2026. Telegram passed one billion monthly active users in March 2025. It is two networks in one app: a public network of channels and groups readable without an account (t.me/s/channelname renders the latest posts as a web page), and a private network of one-to-one chats, private groups and secret chats that no OSINT method reaches.

## The three identifiers
- Username: optional, changeable and reusable. A handle in a two-year-old post may now belong to someone else.
- User ID: a permanent integer assigned at account creation, never shown in the app, revealed by info bots. It is the only identifier that survives username changes.
- Phone number: resolves to a profile only if the owner allows discovery by number. Bellingcat's open-source telegram-phone-number-checker automates that check and nothing more.

## Tools tested on 9 September 2026
- Telegago (Google custom search over indexed t.me pages): working, no login, limited to what Google cached.
- Lyzem: working; "osint" returned 1,150 results in 15 ms.
- Telemetry (telemetryapp.io): working; self-reports 1.23 million channels and 4.11 billion messages, full search behind sign-up.
- TGStat: working catalogue and analytics in Russian, English and Uzbek; tgstat.ru blocks automated requests.
- telehunt.org: HTTP 522, origin unreachable.
- Combot: working group analytics, self-reports 190,000 active groups.
- Awesome-Telegram-OSINT on GitHub: last pushed August 2024, 2,862 stars.
Verdict: search engines cover the public channel layer well; nothing covers private groups; no tool guarantees retention of posts an admin deleted.

## Leak bots are not OSINT
"Telegram OSINT bots" that return rows from stolen databases for a phone number or name are not open source intelligence: the data was never public, and the output cannot be produced as evidence. OSINT works from information that was lawfully public when collected.

## What deletion does
Any message can be deleted for both sides in one-to-one chats with no time limit (since March 2019). Deleted messages leave Telegram's cloud for all participants. Telegram states it has disclosed zero bytes of user messages to third parties. "Deleted Account" marks messages from an account that was deleted or self-destructed after the default 18 months of inactivity; the messages stay in group history and the user ID is unchanged. Copies survive only where content left the platform before deletion: forwards, screenshots, search engine caches of public channels, archives.

## The September 2024 policy change
Section 8.3 of Telegram's privacy policy now allows disclosure of a suspect's IP address and phone number on a valid judicial order for criminal activity violating its terms. Before the change, 14 requests affecting 108 users had been fulfilled (terrorism only). The first quarter of 2025 covered 22,777 users. Metadata is retained for at most 12 months; account deletion removes all cloud data. Message content is never disclosed.

## The Telegram trail on Reddit
Reddit posts and comments mentioning "telegram" in THINKPOL's archive: 3.8 million in 2022, 11.1 million in 2023, 14.1 million in 2024, 7.6 million in 2025, 5.2 million in 2026 to date. Most recent comments containing a t.me/ link are AutoModerator posts pointing subreddit members to a community's Telegram group, including backup channels for NSFW and piracy communities. When a subreddit is banned, its migration path to Telegram is already in the archive.

## What THINKPOL adds today
THINKPOL archives Reddit, not Telegram: 30 billion posts and comments since 2005, captured at publication, deleted and removed content retained, searchable in under 300 ms from EU infrastructure. For Telegram work it supplies the Reddit side of the trail: invite links, handles and IDs posted on Reddit, including in deleted posts and banned subreddits, and the accounts that posted them. Free search: https://think-pol.com/tools/reddit-search?q=t.me%2F. Native Telegram coverage is the next platform on THINKPOL's roadmap.

Source: https://think-pol.com/telegram-osint