Kazakhstan bans Telegram dating bot ‘Daivinchik,’ the same one tied to Russia’s case against Durov
A Kazakhstani court has banned the Telegram dating chatbot “Daivinchik” over the lack of age verification. The same bot was cited in July by Russian investigators in their case labeling Telegram founder Pavel Durov a terrorist.
A court in Kazakhstan has banned the Telegram-based dating chatbot “Daivinchik” at the request of the prosecutor’s office, the outlet Tengri News reported. Prosecutors argued that the bot lacked any mechanism to verify users’ ages, and that its use by minors had contributed to crimes being committed.
On August 13, Kazakhstan experienced a major Telegram outage, while no comparable disruptions were reported elsewhere in the world. Industry observers suggested the outage may have been an attempt by authorities to restrict access to the app, since Telegram remained fully reachable through VPN connections.
Link to the Durov case
In late July, Russia’s Federal Financial Monitoring Service (Rosfinmonitoring) added Telegram founder Pavel Durov to its list of terrorists and extremists, after he was charged with aiding terrorist activity. At the time, Russia’s Investigative Committee pointed to the “Daivinchik” chatbot as a platform it claims Ukrainian intelligence services used to recruit underage Russians for sabotage operations.
