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digitalmethodsinitiative
Banned Telegram account
The telegram account that we were using to retrieve messages on Telegram has been banned after using it with 4cat to download data from 5 channels and 250 items per channel.
Is this a common or expected issue? Why is this happening?
Hi @Akronix , this is not a known issue, we have used 4CAT to collect large Telegram datasets (250,000+ messages) without problems in the past. 4CAT doesn't use any 'tricks' either, it connects to the Telegram API according to its specifications as implemented by Telethon.
What kind of ban is this? Is it a temporary timeout or a permanent ban? Could you perhaps share the 4CAT error message or ban alert you received?
It happened again. We created new Telegram account just for this and we tried to retrieve the last 250 messages for two or three public channels and Telegram banned our account.
It's a permanent ban. There's no ban alert, it just signed out from all devices and we can't sign in with this number anymore. We have contacted [email protected] to know what the issue is.
This is the error message given by 4cat:
Authentication failed. An unexpected error (The used phone number has been banned from Telegram and cannot be used anymore. Maybe check https://www.telegram.org/faq_spam (caused by SendCodeRequest)) occurred and your authentication could not be verified.
What were the 5 channels and did you already have access to them on phone number used by the account? Also did you use the account for anything other than access via 4CAT? I ask because the link you shared implies your account was reported by another user which seems odd for 4CAT to cause.
We tried both using a already a brand new Telegram account and an already used Telegram account. The banned was very quick, it could be a report by another user but I would expect some explanation from Telegram in such case.
@Akronix would you mind sharing the channels/queries you were trying to run? You can email them to [email protected] if there are any concerns. We have not had any issue ourselves and been unable to reproduce. I'd like to test your queries to get a better idea if the issue is related to 4CAT or something else.