No Premium - no access to your account?

A scandal has erupted in the English-speaking community: allegedly, Telegram decided to make money on the forced purchase of Premium.

A Reddit user complained that the messenger requires you to buy a subscription to log into your account:

"He refuses to text my number and asks me to get Premium if I want to log in? What kind of nonsense is this...?

"What a cheap way to get users to sign up for Premium," ricardomilos090 complained (don't google the name without the numbers, please!).

This came as a shock to the user, as there was no other way to reset the unknown email address that he had not linked to his account.

💘 The interlocutors of the topic supported the victim with their stories about being ignored by moderators, the inability to log into their hacked accounts, and so on.

💘 However, the thing is that sending one-time SMS codes for entry in the country of the complainant (presumably India) is very expensive. Premium would help the messenger to recoup its costs.

💘 Telegram has recently started implementing a weekly Premium subscription , which may be useful for users from such countries. In this case, both the messenger and the user will not lose much money.

📰 Yesterday, a French newspaper claimed that my detainment in France last summer ‘finally’ forced Telegram to comply with European rules. This is false. Telegram has always been compliant with EU laws. 🇪🇺

👮‍♂️ After last August, it was the French police that finally started to ‘comply with European rules’ — by sending their requests to Telegram in the legal way described by the EU’s Digital Services Act. As a result, French courts have been able to receive IP addresses of criminal suspects from Telegram. 🧑‍⚖️

🌐 The information about this legal way to reach us could be obtained on our apps, website or just by googling ‘telegram eu police’ — long before my detainment in France. Why the French courts and police had been ignoring this process clearly defined by EU law is still a mystery to us, but it’s unfair to say that Telegram somehow ignored European rules. Paradoxically, it was French law enforcement that for some reason had been ignoring them. 🤔

🇫🇷 I love France and respect its police force, so I didn’t want to embarrass anyone by pointing out the above. But I cannot ignore when such obvious misinformation about Telegram is spread. 🙅‍♂️

🥈 Telegram is the 2nd most popular messaging app in the world. We spend millions of dollars every year to ensure our compliance with laws across the globe. In the EU in particular, we always start preparing to comply with laws years before they even come into force. 🗓