Telegram Account Hacked: 49 Reviews (2026)

Telegram holds 3.82 stars on Google Play from 17,238,515 ratings, on more than a billion installs. 3,907,114 of those ratings are a single star, and 5,356,092 of them, 31.1% of everything the store has counted, are 1 to 3 stars. On the App Store it holds 4.01 stars from 280,313 ratings, which is low for an iOS listing of that size. Most of the apps we write about are a full star higher there than on Play. Telegram is not.

We pulled the 36,000 most recent US Google Play reviews, a continuous run from 21 April to 16 September 2026: 149 days, no gap in the daily counts, between 85 and 679 reviews a day. 16,499 of them were 1 to 3 stars, and 4,379 of the negatives were substantial (120 characters or more). 80.5% of those were 1-star.

222 of the 4,379, one in twenty, describe an account being hacked, stolen or taken over. We read the 63 of them that also name an email address, a login code or an OTP, and 49 survived that reading. Those 49 describe one mechanism, and it is the reason this article exists.

The Recovery Path Belongs to Whoever Got There First

In these reviews the attacker does not simply log in. The attacker attaches their own email address to the account, or sets a two-step verification password. From that moment the login codes go to the attacker's mailbox, and the person still holding the SIM card cannot get one.

My Telegram account was hacked and an unknown person linked their own email to my account. Now all login codes are being sent to that stranger’s email instead of my phone number. I still own the SIM card and phone number, but I cannot access my account anymore.

Why is Telegram not asking for a SMS OTP verification for a new email or email change? As you know, the hacker first added his own email, which can't be accessed by the actual user, causing an additional trouble for recovery.

48 of the 49 are 1-star reviews. That is 97.9%, against 80.5% across substantial negatives generally. People do not write a 3-star review about losing their account.

The 14 we eliminated from the 63 are worth naming, because they show what the number is not. Six describe a hack and silent support without mentioning the recovery path at all. Two are about being locked out after changing phones, with no attacker in the story. One argues that email verification is insecure without reporting a personal case. The last five are a frozen account, a comment about biometrics, a complaint about reporting spam, a payment prompt the reviewer could not explain, and a login loop after a recovery that had already worked.

The Second Door: Reviewers Say the SMS Code Costs Money

There is a separate cluster, larger than the first. 116 of the 4,379 substantial negatives, 2.6%, say Telegram asked them to buy Premium or pay a fee before it would send a login code by SMS. 100 of the 116 are 1-star.

Unfair SMS Fee for Login Extremely disappointed with Telegram forcing users to buy Premium just to receive a login verification SMS. Charging for basic account access completely ruins the user experience.

Have been using the app for years now.. Only for me to change phone and wanted to login to my new phone was mandated to do a premium subscription just to get sms verification code to login.. For weeks now am unable to access my account... Very bad

13 of the 116 mention a week of Premium. Reviewers who name a figure name small ones: one dollar twenty five from Nepal, 72 pesos, 2,000 naira from Nigeria, an amount in rand from South Africa. Four say they paid and the code still did not arrive.

SCAM!!!!! In order to sign up telegram said I need to buy a premium package so that they will send the SMS verification. I paid and never received the sms. then they asked me to pay again!?! SCAMMERS!

This cluster is in every month of the window. It is 3.1% of April's substantial negatives, 1.9% of May's, 2.0% of June's, 3.8% of July's, 3.2% of August's and 2.2% of the first sixteen days of September. Nothing in this corpus says it started recently. It reads as the standing state of the app.

Where the Two Clusters Meet

Only 6 reviews are in both sets, which means the paywall complaint and the hijack complaint mostly come from different people. They are still the same door. If your email is the attacker's email, SMS is the only route left, and these are the reviews describing what happens when a person in that position asks for a text message.

Account got hacked. i tried resetting for 7 days. i waited. and right at the last moment, the hacker changed the email. i cant even get the code to my sms because you guys CHARGE for that? outrageous.

Hello, my account has been hacked and the unauthorized attacker has changed my 2FA recovery email to their own. When I try to reset it, the application forces a 'Telegram Premium Required' paywall due to high SMS costs. I cannot pay for Premium on a hijacked account.

Need premium for sms. This was really not helpful. Someone has hacked into my account and changed my email and recovery code only going to that email. Also telegram support does not respond.

We cannot verify a single one of these accounts, and we cannot tell you why an SMS was refused in any individual case. What we can say is that 49 people describing a stolen account and 116 people describing a paywalled code are writing in the same review feed, in the same months, about the same two steps of the same flow.

The Support Answer Is Usually No Answer

174 of the 4,379 substantial negatives say support did not reply. 62 of them are not written to other users at all. They are written to Telegram, in the shape of a support ticket, with a greeting and a case description, in a public review box on a store listing.

Dear Telegram Support Team, It is with great sadness that I have to report that my Telegram account has been hacked. Someone has removed my email address from my Telegram account and added their own email address without my permission.

That is what a review looks like when someone has run out of channels. It also tells you how the review score is being formed: some part of Telegram's 3.82 is people filing tickets into a rating field because they could not find anywhere else to file them.

No Version Owns This

The 49 spread across the whole window rather than clustering in a release. They are 0.9% of April's substantial negatives, 0.7% of May's, 0.7% of June's, 2.0% of July's, 1.2% of August's and 1.2% of September's. July is the high point, and 18 reports in a month is not enough to call that a break rather than noise.

The build tags say the same thing. The 49 carry 17 different build tags, the largest of them holding 7 reports, and 12 carry no version at all. The 116 SMS reviews carry 24 build tags and 33 with no version. We are not claiming Telegram changed something on a date. We are reporting a mechanism that this corpus shows in every month it covers.

Not Only in English

We swept 34 country and language buckets on Google Play. The five other English buckets returned nothing new, and Mexico, Argentina, Portugal and Egypt duplicated Spain, Brazil and Saudi Arabia, the same language rule we see on every app. The remaining 24 buckets gave 14,400 reviews the US pull had not seen, 2,066 of them substantial negatives.

89 of those, spread across 19 buckets, describe a hacked or stolen account. That is a floor rather than a count, because our word patterns cannot cover every language's way of saying it. 15 of the 89 also name a code, an email or an SMS, and they describe exactly what the English reviews describe.

Ukrainian

Захист від взлому поганий! Для відновлення входу треба платити! Коли реєструєшся то приходить смс з кодом на вайбер, а коли відновлюєш вхід, то вони пишуть, що у вашій країні дорогі смс, тому пропонують купити преміум пакет ((( Підтримка не відповідає!!!

Turkish

berbat ötesi bir uygulama hesabım çalındı çalan kişi listedeki arkadaşlarıma mesaj atıp borç para talep ediyor 3. günüm hiçbir şekilde sms ile doğrulama gelmiyor telefonuma telegramınıza kod gönderildi diyor telegrama girebilsek zaten kod neden talep edeyim?

Russian

Уже вторую ночь пытаются взломать мой акк, хотя я не переходил не на какие фишинговые сайты и пароли не сообщал. снимают двойную аутификацию и облачный пароль. поддержка никак не реагирует, как будто на той стороне вообще никого нет.

Vietnamese

bị hack đổi luôn email gửi bằng sms thì ko gửi đc do vị trí quá xa yêu cầu ad thêm khôi phục tài khoản bằng số điện thoại

German

3.08.26.Mein Account wurde gehackt,Support reagiert nicht. 06.08 Support reagiert immer noch nicht. Nach 3 Mails keine Hilfe. Account immer noch von Hacker besetzt. 8.8 - erneut kontakt zu Support. 10.08. Keine Reaktion von Support bis jetzt.

German

Bisher war ich mit Telegram mehr als zufrieden. Nach einem Reset des S10+, lässt sich Telegram nicht mehr installieren. Es erscheint immer das man für eine Woche Premium benötigt um es für einen Euro+ zu aktivieren wegen SMS Kosten? Wurde es gehackt?

Read the Ukrainian one against the English SMS reviews. It says recovery costs money, that registration sends a code but recovery says SMS is expensive in your country and offers a Premium package instead, and that support does not answer. The Turkish reviewer is on day three, watching the person holding the account ask their contact list for a loan. The second German review is not about a hack at all: a phone reset, a reinstall, and a demand for a week of Premium because of SMS costs.

What We Cannot Tell You

How these accounts were taken. Almost none of these reviews describe the first step. A few mention a flood of calls, a voicemail breach or a code they typed for someone. Most start at the moment they were logged out. Phishing, SIM swap, a leaked code and a genuine platform flaw would all produce the same review.

Whether any specific recovery was possible. Telegram documents recovery paths we cannot test from here, and a reviewer who got back in usually stops writing. Silence in a review corpus is not evidence that nothing worked.

Whether the SMS refusals are policy or fault. Reviewers report two different messages, one about Premium and one about SMS costs in their country. We are reporting what they say the screen said.

What This Does Not Show

Negative reviews are self-selected. 17,681 of the 36,000 reviews we pulled are 5-star. 49 hijack reports is 1.1% of substantial negatives, not a rate of account theft among a billion installs.

We cannot verify a single account. We cannot confirm that any of these reviewers were hacked, charged, or refused a code.

This is Android, in one store. The App Store listing holds 4.01 stars on version 12.9.4, and nothing here measures behaviour on iOS, on desktop or on the web client.

Counts are floors. Every number above comes from a narrow phrase rule, followed by reading each match by hand. Reviewers who described the same thing in other words are not counted.

Nothing here is security advice. If your account is gone, the only authority on recovering it is Telegram. This article is a record of what 4,379 substantial negative reviews say.

Read the Full Breakdown

You can read the full negative review breakdown for Telegram on Android, or go to the trust check, the cancellation guide if you bought Premium, and apps like it. For the wider field, see our messaging apps compared by what users complain about. For other apps where people lost an account and could not get a person to answer, see PayPal accounts limited after an ID upload and Chime accounts closed with disputes denied. For a smaller setting that also stops doing what it is told, see Google Maps and the 48 reviews about satellite view.