Lessons From Processing Millions of Telegram Messages: What We Learned About Spam

We've spent years building an AI anti-spam system for Telegram. After processing millions of messages across hundreds of communities, here are the patterns we discovered. Spam Has Evolved Forget the obvious stuff — links, ALL CAPS, "CLICK HERE FOR FREE MONEY." Modern Telegram spammers are sophisticated: The Edit Trick Post a normal message. Wait an hour. Edit it into a scam link. Most bots never re-check edited messages. We learned this the hard way and built edit monitoring into our core pipeline. The Trust Builder Join a group. Post 5-10 normal messages over a few days. Build credibility. Then drop the spam. Keyword filters can't catch this because the spam message itself might look innocent — it's the pattern that's suspicious. The Avatar Bait Create accounts with provocative profile photos. Join groups. Post nothing — the avatar itself is the spam (drives clicks to the profile with links in bio). This requires pre-message analysis that most bots don't do. The Multi-Account Wave Hit