A Large-Scale Study of Telegram Bots

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 25 Mar 2026] A Large-Scale Study of Telegram Bots Taro Tsuchiya, Haoxiang Yu, Tina Marjanov, Alice Hutchings, Nicolas Christin, Alejandro Cuevas Telegram, initially a messaging app, has evolved into a platform where users can interact with various services through programmable applications, bots. Bots provide a wide range of uses, from moderating groups, helping with online shopping, to even executing trades in financial markets. However, Telegram has been increasingly associated with various illicit activities -- financial scams, stolen data, non-consensual image sharing, among others, raising concerns bots may be facilitating these operations. This paper is the first to characterize Telegram bots at scale, through the following contributions. First, we offer the largest general-purpose message dataset and the first bot dataset. Through snowball sampling from two published datasets, we uncover over 67,000 additional channels, 492 million messages, and 32,000 bots. Second, we develop a system to automatically interact with bots in order to extract their functionality. Third, based on their description, chat responses, and the associated channels, we classify bots into several domains. Fourth, we investigate the communities each bot serves, by analyzing supported languages, usage patterns (e.g., duration, reuse), and network topology. While our analysis discovers useful applications such as crowdsourcing, we also identify malicious bots (e.g., used for financial scams, illicit underground services) serving as payment gateways, referral systems, and malicious AI endpoints. By exhorting the research community to look at bots as software infrastructure, this work hopes to foster further research useful to content moderators, and to help interventions against illicit activities. Comments: Proceedings of the 20th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2026) Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Computers and Society (cs.CY) Cite as: arXiv:2603.24302 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2603.24302v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.24302 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Taro Tsuchiya [view email] [v1] Wed, 25 Mar 2026 13:41:47 UTC (513 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cs cs.CY References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)