How to stop spam bots in a Telegram group

Why do spam bots join my group at all?

Because it is cheap and it works. Public groups appear in Telegram search and in directories. Invite links get reposted. Scripts join thousands of groups a day with bought accounts, and one reply in a thousand pays for the run.

Most of these accounts do one of three things:

• Post at once. A link, a "giveaway", an offer of work. These are the ones Telegram's own settings stop.
• Wait. The account joins, stays silent for a day or a week, then posts. By then it no longer looks new.
• Never post. It reads your member list and messages your members privately, often posing as one of your admins. See the fake admin scam.

If your group is the discussion group of a channel, the same accounts post under every channel post. See spam in channel comments.

Which Telegram settings stop spam bots?

Do these six first. They cost nothing and take ten minutes.

1. Approve new members. In a public group, turn on Approve new members. In a private group, create invite links with Request admin approval. Nobody posts until they are let in.
2. Restrict what members can send. Open Permissions and switch off what your group does not need from ordinary members: media, stickers and GIFs, polls, and Embed links.
3. Turn on slow mode. Thirty seconds between messages is invisible to people and ends single-account floods.
4. Enable aggressive anti-spam. In groups with more than 200 members, open Administrators and switch on Aggressive Anti-Spam. If it removes a real message, an admin can mark the mistake in Recent Actions.
5. Hide the member list. Groups with 100 or more members can hide it. This is the single setting that protects members from private-message scams.
6. Trim admins and bots. Remove bots you no longer use. Give each remaining bot only the rights it needs. Every bot with admin rights is one more account that can be imitated or taken over.

One limit to know: Telegram has no setting that blocks links typed into a message. Embed links only removes the preview. Blocking links takes a bot.

Telegram's built-in anti-spam tools goes through each of these settings in more detail, with what gets past each one.

Where do Telegram's settings stop working?

The settings above judge an account when it joins and judge a message by its type. Current spam is built to pass both.

What should an anti-spam bot do?

A keyword bot with a settings page fails on every row of that table. When you choose a bot, ask for these six things:

1. It reads every message, not a sample and not only messages that match a word list.
2. It reads edits again. A message that changes is a new message.
3. It reads pictures and QR codes.
4. It screens at the door: a challenge for new accounts, plus account age and profile checks.
5. It explains every action and lets an admin undo it in one tap. A ban nobody can explain costs you a member's trust.
6. It can run without acting. You should be able to watch what it would have done for a week before you let it remove anything.

Targa was built around that list. It is AI-powered and reads every message and every edit, normalizes lookalike characters before judging, reads text and QR codes inside images, and screens join requests as a Telegram Guardian bot. Every action carries a reason you can read with /why. If you want to watch it first, shadow mode removes nothing and logs what it would have done. The free plan runs every detector; the plans differ in volume, not in protection. Targa is in private beta, so access is by request. There is more on how it works.

What no bot can do, Targa included: read the private messages your members receive. That defence is the hidden member list, a pinned warning, and catching the impersonating account while it sits in your group.

If your group already runs Combot or Rose, the Combot page and the Rose page hold each one up against this list.

How do I remove spam bots that are already inside?

1. Open Recent Actions and filter for new members. It covers the last 48 hours.
2. Look for batches: many accounts joining within the same minute, with no photo or with similar names.
3. Ban them, and check that they appear under Removed Users. An account on that list cannot rejoin through an invite link.
4. Revoke the invite link they came through and create a new one with approval turned on.
5. Remove deleted accounts from the member list while you are there.

If a wave is larger than you can clear by hand in two days, that is the moment a bot earns its place. For a group that is already full of spam accounts, the cleanup order goes step by step.

What should I avoid?

• Do not rely on a word list. It stops last month's spam and removes your own members when they quote it.
• Do not give a bot every admin right. Deleting messages and banning users is what moderation needs. A bot never needs to add new admins.
• Do not make the group private as the only fix. Invite links leak, and your members are still reachable.
• Do not argue with the account in the chat. Ban it, and tell members what it was.