According to Telegram advertising market research in 2025, between 20% and 35% of ad spend in the messenger is wasted due to fake inflation. The numbers look impressive, the promised reach seems large, but real clicks and conversions are zero. Dishonest channel owners have long mastered the art of creating the illusion of a live audience — and it has become dangerously easy to do.
How Fraudulent Channels Simulate Engagement
Modern Telegram inflation operates on multiple levels simultaneously. The simplest level — subscriber bots with no avatars, no history, no activity — is easily spotted by anyone who looks carefully at the member list. More sophisticated fraudsters use other methods:
- View inflation. View-bots crawl channels and open posts, simulating views. ERR stays at "normal" levels even though there are no real readers.
- Reaction farms. Managed accounts place likes and reactions on posts on demand, creating a veneer of engagement.
- Mutual-subscription schemes. Channels participate in cross-promotion networks where subscribers are equally "dead" readers from other inflated channels.
- Temporary audience rental. Some channels temporarily "rent" active bots only during periods when they're selling ad placements, then remove them.
Key Metrics to Check Before Buying
Before paying for an ad placement, you need to verify several critical indicators.
ERR (Engagement Rate by Reach) — the ratio of average post views to subscriber count, expressed as a percentage. Benchmarks:
- Channels under 10K subscribers: healthy ERR — 30–60%;
- 10K–100K subscribers: 10–25%;
- 100K–500K: 5–15%;
- Over 500K: 3–8%.
An ERR significantly below the lower end of the range for a channel's size is the first warning sign.
Subscriber growth dynamics. Look at the subscriber graph over time. Sharp vertical spikes without visible external causes (no viral posts, no external announcements) indicate bot purchases. Organic growth is always gradual.
View-to-reaction ratio. Real people who read content occasionally leave reactions. A post with 50,000 views and 3 reactions is nonsensical. A healthy ratio: 1–3% of views convert to reactions for topic-focused channels.
Audience profile quality. Browse the member list (where accessible) and scan a few dozen random accounts. Empty profiles without avatars, no message history, names like "user_xxxxxx" — these are bot markers.
The Real Cost of Advertising in a Fake Channel
Imagine paying $400 for a placement in a channel with 200,000 subscribers and 12% ERR. The promised reach is 24,000 views. If 60% of those are bots, the real views are 9,600. Your effective CPM (cost per 1,000 real impressions) just jumped from the promised $16.67 to $41.67.
This is not just overpaying — it also corrupts the data you use to optimize future placements. Fake traffic doesn't just burn budget; it poisons your entire advertising analytics.
The TGuard Cleanness Report: What to Request from the Channel Owner
Over more than three years of operation, TGuard has built a database of over 10 million known bot accounts. Channel owners who connect TGuard as an admin receive a Cleanness Report — a full audit of their own channel's audience quality. This is the document to request from any channel before buying ad space.
The Cleanness Report is generated from data TGuard accumulates on the channel's side. It covers three layers of analysis:
- Bot database cross-reference. Channel members are checked against a continuously updated database of over 10 million known bot accounts.
- Dead and deleted account detection. Accounts that have been inactive for a long time and deleted accounts are flagged separately.
- Cleanness score. The channel receives a score from 0 to 100 based on the ratio of bots, dead, and deleted accounts to the total scanned audience.
What to Look for in the Cleanness Report
When reviewing a TGuard Cleanness Report shared by the channel owner, pay particular attention to:
- Cleanness score — the overall audience quality rating (0–100); below 70 warrants scrutiny;
- Bot count — members matched against the known bot database;
- Dead account count — members with very low activity levels;
- Coverage — what percentage of the total membership was actually scanned.
Frequently Asked Questions
Signs of inflation: ERR below 5–7% for large channels, sudden subscriber spikes without any visible external promotion, mismatched view and reaction counts, and large numbers of blank profiles in the member list.
ERR (Engagement Rate by Reach) is the ratio of post views to subscriber count. For a healthy channel, ERR is typically 15–40% for small channels and 5–15% for large ones (100K+). Below 5% warrants investigation.
Channel owners install TGuard as an admin and it accumulates full subscriber history — every join and leave event cross-referenced against a known bot database. The result is a Cleanness Report with an audience quality score. As an ad buyer, ask the channel owner to share this report before you pay.
If you own a channel that sells ad placements, TGuard continuously monitors and protects your audience metrics from being inflated by bot attacks. If a competitor attempts to pollute your numbers with bots to undermine your ad pricing credibility, TGuard detects and blocks the attack — preserving the data accuracy behind the Cleanness Report you share with advertisers.