Search for Telegram groups based on location
On June 23, 2019, the Russian messaging service Telegram announced on its website that they had made “exchanging contact information” easier. Since this update, it should be possible for you as an OSINT researcher to search for groups and users on Telegram based on their location. In this short blog post we explain how you can do that.
Telegram update 23-06-2019
Since the Telegram update in June this year, it is possible to search for users and groups based on their location. That means that if we find ourselves in one location, we get suggestions from users and groups in the same location in our search results. So we can simply check which users and groups are active in which region. Are we going to travel all over the country to map users and groups of everything to locations? Of course not, because that would take way too much time. We solve this by spoofing our location. By this we actually mean that we manually set our location to a different location.
What do we need for this?
Get started on Telegram
Step 1: Open the (virtual) device;
Step 2: Open the Google Playstore;
Step 3: Download Telegram. If all is well, your mobile phone environment will look like the image below.
Step 4: click on the three dots on the left side and select “V-loc“;
Step 5: choose a virtual location. In our example we have chosen the location “Rotterdam” in the Netherlands. Click on “Move here” in the bottom right to save the location.
Step 6: Open Telegram;
Step 7: click on the three stripes on the left side and select “Contacts“;
Step 8: click on “Add people Nearby” en see the groups results based on your location.
More information?
Do you want to know more about how you can effectively search for information on Telegram? Then contact us or register for one of our OSINT training courses. Do you also have tips or suggestions for this article? Please let us know!