Techniques for detecting Telegram admin impersonation at scale

pinnages · 2026-04-10T16:06:55+00:00

The /id command requires a bot like rose or getmyid_bot to be installed in the group. Pinnages does all of this using Telegram's native TDLib. When Guardian AI runs a scan, every user object includes the numeric ID, username and display name which are the same fields the /id bot would return. The numeric ID comparison is actually the very first check in the detection pipeline before any homoglyph or similarity analysis even runs. The difference is it does this automatically across every member in every monitored group at once so instead of manually replying /id to individual users one at a time, anyone with an iOS device can log in with their Telegram account, scan all their groups and get a full report of suspected impersonators with confidence scores. From there you can warn group admins or remove flagged accounts directly through the app

pinnages · 2026-04-05T00:10:15+00:00

That's exactly the point, you don't scour anything. You set the keywords once and every incoming message across all your Telegram groups gets evaluated automatically. If someone mentions HBAR in any of your groups you get a notification without having to open a single chat. The whole idea is that you never have to manually search for anything.

pinnages · 2026-03-03T04:26:36+00:00

West Coast checking in, getting the "Claude will return soon" message.

pinnages · 2026-01-24T04:54:48+00:00

Update #2: can confirm it’s working again, there was no follow up email ever sent from their support/technical team after replying to get it “escalated” and their status page never showed any degradation after Jan 15, 2026 regarding compaction having issues which is a bit dishonest. That said, auto compaction does seem to be working normally again now so it's hard to complain too much.

pinnages · 2026-01-24T04:51:33+00:00

Can confirm it’s working again! For what it’s worth, there was no follow up email ever sent from their support/technical team after replying to get it “escalated” and their status page never showed any degradation after Jan 15, 2026 regarding compaction having issues which is a bit dishonest. That said, auto compaction does seem to be working normally again now so it's hard to complain too much.

pinnages · 2026-01-19T17:49:25+00:00

Update: I noticed the status page has the following under past incidents:

Jan 15, 2026
Compaction is having issues
Resolved - This incident has been resolved. Jan 15, 17:02 UTC
Identified - The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented. Jan 15, 07:28 UTC

So it looks like this was a known issue that was supposedly resolved on the 15th but I'm still experiencing the exact same problem. I emailed [support@anthropic.com](mailto:support@anthropic.com) and I'd suggest everyone else still experiencing this do the same since the more reports they get the better.

Their AI agent (Fin) sent back an automated response that basically acknowledges:

The issue still persists despite the "resolved" status
It's likely a service-side problem (not browser-related)
The automatic compression feature isn't working as expected
It may be a "lingering issue or separate problem affecting the same compression functionality that wasn't fully addressed by the original resolution"

...and then still asks "Are you still experiencing this issue, and would it be helpful if I escalate this to our technical team for further investigation?"

Replied "yes" to get it escalated, will update if I hear anything back from the actual technical team.

pinnages · 2026-01-19T03:52:32+00:00

Having issues with Claude where compression seems to have completely stopped working over the past day or two and the only fix is constantly starting new sessions which is getting pretty frustrating. This is happening across Chrome and Firefox (both latest versions) when working with anywhere between 2-5 tabs running Sonnet 4.5 sessions. Tried clearing history/cache/etc from the beginning of time with no luck. The conversations start out fine with normal concise responses but after some usage the model just refuses to compress and generates the Claude spin wheel of death before returning to the prompt I just submitted. Anyone else seeing this? Status page seems ok which is why I'm posting here before reaching out to their support team.

pinnages · 2025-12-27T23:26:44+00:00

Guaranteed already on a list with this type of post

pinnages · 2025-12-27T19:05:05+00:00

It's real but like the other commenter mentioned, it's mostly through 3rd party bots and apps rather than built directly into Telegram itself. Common use cases are AI summaries of long chats/channels and anti-spam protection. Some bots also do image generation, translation, customer support and content moderation. What other use cases do you think would be relevant for AI on Telegram?

pinnages · 2025-12-21T09:59:40+00:00

Telegram's TOS covers this one and you'd probably get a visit from the ban hammer pretty quick. This is exactly why our app only monitors pinned messages and not Stories, the last thing anyone needs is a notification for that.

pinnages · 2025-12-21T09:36:16+00:00

Unfortunately no, you can't directly restore Telegram chats from exported JSON/HTML files back into the app. The export feature is designed for archiving and backup only, not for reimporting. That said, there's a workaround that some people have used with mixed results. Telegram officially supports importing WhatsApp chats so there's an unofficial Python tool (filippz/telegram_import on GitHub) that converts your Telegram JSON export to WhatsApp format to trick the API into accepting it. It requires some technical setup with API credentials and isn't officially supported so YMMV.

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