I'm a little late to the party but I'm just going to write about what happened last night on Telegram. I was speaking with a friend who's often pushed me towar

I'm a little late to the party but I'm just going to write about what happened last night on Telegram. I was speaking with a friend who's often pushed me towards Signal. For context: I left Signal because of Moxie. The usability concerns and terrible Electron desktop apps didn't help but Moxie's attitude and the fact that he's just not rich enough to be free of gov/corp influence were my motivating factors. He fought us for dropping dependency on Google Play Services, refuses to allow 3rd party distribution, and is anti-federation. I've been having a back and forth with Telegram over email since the events of last night. It's... interesting. (last response was a couple minutes ago) So last night, I was speaking with this friend and he remarked that he used a burner to register his Telegram number, he was expected it to be banned at any time. I was in the middle of typing back to him "I wouldn't worry, so long as the account is active" and my account was instantly banned before I could hit send. I was trying to provide him this re-assurance because I use Telegram with a Google Voice number instead of a carrier number that could be ported out easier. Trying to sign back in the clients tell you the number is banned. There is a help button. It gives you a pre-drafted email filled out with app version, OS version, and phone number asking for help to unban.... and it's addressed to login@stel.com. I found this peculiar as recover@telegram.org is the email used in most documentation and is what other people suggested to email. Within a few minutes of this email being sent my account was re-enabled with nothing deleted except my chat mutes. They apologized and I inquired about wtf had just happened. They told me that it was likely due to my usage of Google Voice and not to worry as my number is now on a whitelist. Furthermore they said in their response: "Or why did you have such unusual authorization parameters?". I use the secondary app password, I listed off all the clients I've used... the only really bizarre one being an ancient QT port of the desktop client to Blackberry 10 (I was curious to see if anything still worked on that platform). They told me it was likely due to that. I questioned them about use of pattern matching in private messages, not once did I hear a denial of this. I could see it being done to prevent bot or terrorist activity, but my guess is talking about 'burners' and having a Google Voice number was enough to have me slip below their trust level even though my account is years old. EDIT: Turns out the friend I was speaking to had people logging into his account this morning. I've also reported this to Telegram. The unauthorized logins changed his account name on each login.