Three hundred new members overnight. Mohammed, Priya, 王伟, a run of names that read right to left — and not one extra view on the morning post. The channel is about woodworking in Ohio.
The first thing most admins look for is a country block, because Facebook has one for Pages and every other platform gets asked for one. Telegram doesn't have it. Here is why, and what works instead.
Telegram doesn't tell anyone where a member is
Not you, not your moderators, not any bot you add. A member's phone number is hidden unless they choose to share it, IP addresses never leave Telegram's servers, and there is no country field on a user. When someone joins, a bot receives their first name, last name, username, whether they have Premium and a few technical flags. That is the whole picture.
So any "country filter" you find for Telegram is guessing from something. The only thing worth guessing from is the name — and specifically, the alphabet it is written in.
Telegram hides a member's country from everyone. The script of their name it shows to every bot.
Where the waves of foreign names come from
The boring answer covers most cases: someone bought members. The cheapest packages don't use bots at all; they pay real people a few cents to join a channel. A few cents is worth the click in India, Nigeria or parts of Southeast Asia, which is why bought batches look the way they do. We went through how these services price and deliver in our breakdown of subscriber boosting.
Account farms are the second source. A brand-new account with zero subscriptions looks suspicious to Telegram and to anti-spam tools, so farms "warm up" their stock by joining public channels they find in search. Being public is all it takes to end up on that list.
And sometimes the order wasn't yours. A competitor, or an ad seller you turned down, can buy you a thousand empty accounts to wreck your numbers before a campaign. In groups the pattern shifts again: Arabic and Chinese names there more often belong to bots that join to post an ad, which is covered in how to stop spam in a Telegram group.
Silent members still cost you. A 2,000-member channel averaging 600 views has a 30% ERR. Add 300 members who never read, and with the same 600 views it drops to 26%. Telegram's own channel statistics also include a languages chart, and an advertiser who sees a fifth of your audience in Arabic and Hindi won't ask who ordered them.
Filtering by the alphabet of the name
TGuard has a setting under "🔰 Security settings and clean up" called "🌐 Name script filter". You tick the scripts you don't expect in your audience — Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Hebrew — and the bot stops letting in anyone whose first or last name contains their letters. It works in channels and groups alike.
New members are banned or kicked, depending on your channel's ban-or-kick setting. Join requests are handled more firmly: the request is declined and the requester banned in the same step, because a decline alone just invites a new request a minute later. The check runs before captcha and before auto-approval, so these requests never reach your queue.
The part we spent longest on is the two-letter rule. Before shipping, we ran the filter over 9.9 million names from our own database. Banning on any single character would have been a mess: 79% of "Korean" matches were invisible Hangul filler characters people use to make a blank name, and 58% of "Thai" matches were diacritics in stylised Russian nicknames. So the filter counts only letters and needs at least two. "Anna シ" gets in. "Anna 李娜" doesn't.
A few things worth knowing before you switch it on:
- Hindi covers the other Indian scripts too — Bengali, Tamil, Telugu — since spam from India is signed in all of them.
- Arabic script is also used for Persian and Urdu, so the Arabic filter catches those names as well.
- Japanese names often contain kanji, which are Chinese characters, so the Chinese filter will stop some Japanese members too.
What it won't catch
Rahul Kumar written in Latin letters walks straight in. So does Ahmed. The filter sees an alphabet, not an origin, and a Latin-script name looks like any of your readers. For those waves you need the other layers: a captcha on entry, a join-rate limit, and TGuard's shared blacklist of accounts already caught attacking other channels.
It also only checks people as they join. Members already inside are untouched; the same section has "🧹 Cleanup after bot attack" for subscribers who were boosted in before. And think about who your real audience is. A channel for the Russian-speaking community in Israel will have readers with Hebrew names, and the Hebrew filter would hit them first.
Turning it on
- Add @channel_guardian_bot as an admin of your channel or group with the right to ban users.
- In the bot, pick the channel → "🔰 Security settings and clean up" → "🌐 Name script filter".
- Tap the scripts to block. Tap again to remove one; changes apply immediately.
- Check "⛔ Configure how to block: ban or kick" — the filter uses whatever is set there.
- If a wave already landed, use "🧹 Cleanup after bot attack" in the same section.
Anyone can open the filter screen and read how it works; switching it on needs a TGuard subscription. If the script you need isn't listed, message support and it gets added.
You can't close a Telegram channel to a country, and no bot that claims otherwise can see more than ours does. What you can do is read the one thing Telegram shows at the door, and that is usually enough to keep the next wave out of your member count.
Frequently Asked Questions
Not directly. Telegram does not show admins or bots a member's country, phone number or IP address. What a bot does see is the member's first and last name, so the workable signal is the alphabet those are written in. TGuard can refuse anyone whose name contains letters of the scripts you pick: Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai or Hebrew.
Usually because somebody bought members. The cheapest packages fill orders with people paid a few cents to join, and that pay only matters in places like India, Nigeria and Southeast Asia. Fresh accounts being warmed up also subscribe to random public channels so they look active. If you bought nothing, the order may have been placed by someone else.
No. The filter only fires when a name contains at least two letters of a selected script. A single decorative character, such as a lone シ at the end of a nickname, is treated as decoration and let through.