Monitoring public Telegram channels for OSINT at scale
Published
•2 min readG
Hi, I'm George! 👋🏻
✅ Who I am: Full-stack engineer and data extraction specialist. I build scrapers for platforms everyone says can't be scraped — and I do it reliably, at scale.
🤓 My journey: Started as a full-stack engineer, quickly realized the hardest (and most valuable) technical problems are in data extraction. Anti-bot systems, fingerprinting, session management, rate limiting — that's where I live now.
🚀 My work: Creator of the Unblockable ICO Drops Scraper — built to defeat one of the toughest anti-bot systems on the web. Also built scrapers for CoinMarketCap, Shopify stores, TikTok Shop, and LinkedIn. If it has data behind a wall, I've probably cracked it.
⚒️ My skills: Node.js, Crawlee, Playwright, Puppeteer, Advanced Anti-Bot Bypassing, Proxy Management, API Reverse-Engineering, Docker, NestJS, Python.
🚢 Shipped: PenBot (penbotservices.com) — AI platform delivering intelligence through prison email systems. Inmate Creations (inmatecreations.com) — currently in production.
🫱🏻🫲🏽 Work with me: Open to data extraction challenges, automation pipelines, and infrastructure projects. Not open to ticket-taking.
📩 Contact: georgethedeveloper3046@gmail.com
🔗 Portfolio: george-kioko.pages.dev
🐙 GitHub: github.com/the-ai-entrepreneur-ai-hub
Cryptocurrency announcements, airdrop info, rug-pull discussion, PR crisis signals. A lot of high-signal content lives on public Telegram channels and nowhere else. Pulling it at scale without running a full Telegram client is awkward.
The normal options
- Telegram Bot API: can only read messages in bots you own. Useless for monitoring arbitrary public channels.
- TDLib: full Telegram protocol client. Requires auth, phone verification, session storage, and an ongoing runtime. Heavy.
- Telethon / Pyrogram: Python wrappers over the same Telegram client protocol. Same auth overhead.
- Screen scraping t.me preview URLs: works but limited to recent messages only.
What I shipped
An Apify actor that handles Telegram channel scraping with zero auth setup. Input a channel URL or @handle, get back:
- All recent messages (sender, timestamp, text, attachments)
- Message threads and replies
- Channel subscriber count, verified status, about text
$0.003 per message.
Use cases I have seen
- Crypto rug-pull tracking. Watch 50 suspect token channels for the "wallet drained" announcement pattern. Alert on specific phrases.
- Brand monitoring. Some crypto projects announce on Telegram before anywhere else. PR teams want early warning.
- Research archives. Historical record of an active channel for sociological or security research.
- Competitor intelligence. Tracking product announcements by channel rather than scraping every PR site.
Caveats
- Public channels only. Anything behind a login or invite is out of scope. Trying to access private channels is a legal and ethical minefield.
- Channels can be rate-limited by Telegram if you pull too aggressively from one IP. The actor handles this with backoff.
- Old messages from very active channels (10k+ messages) take longer to paginate through.
Try it
Apify actor: apify.com/george.the.developer/telegram-channel-scraper
Output is CSV, JSON, or Excel depending on what you need downstream.
