Welcome to Sisyphus Highway: In Depth.

In the previous episode, the Nth Room case showed how a digital criminal organization used Telegram. Now we continue by examining what other crimes the software has enabled and the roles it has played.

This episode discusses two examples.

The first is doxxing. A person’s name, phone number, national ID number, home address, movements, and even medical and purchase records can be collected, combined, queried, and traded in social-engineering databases on Telegram. Information once scattered across platforms, institutions, and parts of daily life thus becomes a tool for harassment, intimidation, and control.

The second is telecom fraud. Cross-border fraud rings use Telegram to conceal identities, coordinate operations, gather targets, and distribute links, as well as to launder money, conduct transactions, and destroy evidence. Anonymous accounts, groups, channels, bots, and cryptocurrency combine into a highly sophisticated criminal toolkit.

From doxxing to telecom fraud, we continue to ask:as personal information grows easier to obtain and online platforms support ever more complicated forms of collaboration, how does technology change the scale, threshold, and organization of crime? How can we live in a world where identities are continually linked, information continually recorded, and everything may at any moment be recombined and exploited?

 

- Where doxxing data comes from: social-engineering databases on Telegram

- The precondition for doxxing and privacy leaks: real-name registration online

- From individuals to an industry chain: who doxxes, why, and how?

- What do doxxing and being doxxed mean for individuals and society?

- Telecom fraud: where base desires meet infrastructure on Telegram

- What will social media that claims technological neutrality and worships absolute freedom end up carrying?

 

- Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem (book)