‘The biggest consumer fraud’: Telegram CEO claims WhatsApp is secretly reading your private messages

Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov has made a sharp attack on WhatsApp over the app’s promise of end-to-end encryption. Durov accused the company of not only reading users’ private messages but also sharing them with third-party services and called it the ‘biggest consumer fraud in history’.

In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Durov wrote, “WhatsApp’s “encryption” may be the biggest consumer fraud in history — deceiving billions of users. Despite its claims, it reads users’ messages and shares them with third parties. Telegram has never done this — and never will 🤝”.

The message by Durov came shortly after xAI chief Elon Musk attacked the personal messaging app as well, stating that “WhatsApp cannot be trusted” and urged users to switch to X Chat instead.

While Meta is yet to respond to the post by Durov, the company did respond to the controversy on Musk’s post, writing, “The claims in this lawsuit are categorically false and absurd. WhatsApp has been end-to-end encrypted using the Signal protocol for a decade, so your messages cannot be read by anyone other than the sender and recipient.”

Why is WhatsApp under attack?

WhatsApp has faced the wrath of Musk and Durov after a fresh class action lawsuit was filed against its parent company Meta, which claims that it had discreetly allowed its employees and some third-party contractors to intercept, read, and store WhatsApp messages of users.

The lawsuit quoted by Durov in his post (via Classaction.org) reads, “Nowhere does WhatsApp disclose that it, Meta, their respective employees, Accenture contractors, and/or third parties may read, access, or view the contents of all messages users send on WhatsApp, nor that app messages sent by users are intercepted and stored,”

“WhatsApp/Meta employees had backdoor access to all WhatsApp user messages from which they pulled messages to provide to outside investigators in response to requests regarding criminal investigations and/or to Accenture reviewers to review for criminal investigations and/or investigations into violations of company policies,” it adds.

The lawsuit also links back to the accounts of whistleblower accounts told to federal investigators, which came to light via a Bloomberg report earlier in the year. They argue that Meta and WhatsApp, along with third-party contractors, were able to access users’ messages despite the privacy promises made by the company.

On its official website, WhatsApp says, “End-to-end encryption keeps your personal messages and calls between you and the person you’re communicating with. No one outside of the chat, not even WhatsApp, can read, listen to, or share them.”