Telegram Notes: What's this all about?
This is my first official post to what I am calling my "Telegram Notes." After completing my monograph "The Telegram Labyrinth," my team and I looked at one another and asked, "What are we going to do with the information not in the new book?"
The answer, "Do shorter posts in an easily-accessible online service like Bear Blogs." Here we are.
Let me highlight some of the types of short essays that will appear in "Telegram Notes."
I plan to create useful summaries of each of the chapters in "The Telegram Labyrinth." These will be posted to this Bear Blog. If you want to access the full copy of the chapters, please, write me. This book is intended for crime analysts, cyber fraud investigators, and intelligence professionals. I want to be helpful, but I need to control some of the information presented after 18 months of poking into the Telegram maze or, as I prefer, labyrinth.
We also have some information about the "entities" involved with the Telegram platform. We will post, probably every week initially, information about such companies as the TON Strategy Company. We have some information about the people involved with Telegram-related activities. Several of the people are fairly high profile in the financial world in Moscow, the crypto world, and the public US NASDAQ. When we began our Telegram product, I knew zero about these entities. Now I think some information may be of general interest.
My team and I wrote some segments or sections for chapters in the book. As part of the editing process, we chopped information deemed not on point with the needs of a government professional in one of my lectures at public and restricted admission venues. We plan to zip through these sections and present information helpful in understanding more about the 13 year old Telegram platform.
In our research, we discovered that coverage of Telegram-related content appeared in what we called the "crypto media." These are specialist publications tracking Bitcoin and "plays" like the TONcoin, the Telegram crypto currency. Consequently, certain topics are not explored. A good example is our information about a fellow from Uzbekistan who moved to Moscow. He attended university and got hired by a logistics company. Then the individual got frisky and [a] started his own high frequency trading firm and [b] took some shortcuts and chatted with Russian security services. Then, much to my surprise, this individual popped up in Singapore and then Dubai. What was he doing in the United Arab Emirates, a nation state trying to become the Wall Street of the "new financial era in distributed finance"?
This person was serving as the money manager for a firm in Las Vegas entering the artificial intelligence data center business. What's the connection? The company is AlphaTON Capital (NASDAQ:ATON). The "money" passing through this fellow's firm will facilitate the Telegram AI mining service called Cocoon. If you are confused, you are not alone. The "play" is to do money things across jurisdictions to make the life of a cyber fraud investigator more challenging. Based on attendee feedback from those at my lectures, very few people understand the linkages to Russian financial specialists allied to important "independent" associations and to Russia state-affiliated financial institutions. To add some zip to his example, the AlphaTON Capital company was spun up on the shell of a pharma company in a matter of a couple of months. The ticker symbol, according to one person familiar with the "tech bro" culture in St Petersburg told me, "Yeah, that ATON ticker handle is the equivalent of listing a company on NASDAQ with the ticker symbol CIA or NSA."
Is this true? My team and I don't know, but we think it is a potential factoid and may be helpful to someone interested in the connections within the Telegram ecosystem.
One final point. I will include this email kentmaxwell at proton.com as the designated collection point for questions, comments, and suggestions. If you poke around, you can locate my "real" email. It will be easier for my team and me to address email from Bear Blog readers.
PS. We have a nifty masthead for Telegram Notes. We have to take this Bear Blog service a step at a time.
PPS. Exercise caution when signing up for Telegram's Messenger. The app functions as a Yahoo-style portal to "regular" Web content and to some more interesting services and features. Examples range from addictive egames with a crypto "hook" to proprietary programming languages you can use to build a multi-wallet financial service.
Stephen E Arnold, January 2, 2025, 10 am