A channel with 40,000 subscribers getting 2,800 views per post. That's 7% reach — not terrible, but the same channel at 25,000 subscribers two years ago pulled 14%. The content hasn't changed. The posting frequency hasn't changed. What changed is that several thousand of those 40,000 subscribers no longer exist.
What a deleted Telegram account actually is
Telegram deactivates accounts after extended inactivity — typically several months of no logins. Once deactivated, the account loses its username, profile photo, and message history. In any channel or group member list, it shows up as "Deleted Account" with a blank avatar.
The catch: deactivated accounts don't unsubscribe from channels automatically. They stay in your member list indefinitely. Telegram doesn't decrement your subscriber counter. As far as the platform's metrics are concerned, the user is simply silent.
Why they accumulate
Any channel that's been running for two or more years has them. Someone subscribed in 2022, stopped using Telegram, their account got deactivated — but they're still in your channel. Multiply that by the thousands of people who passed through your channel over the years.
Old bot subscriptions add to this. Many bot farms from 2020–2022 used low-activity accounts that Telegram has since deleted. The channel subscriber count from those campaigns still reflects those accounts.
The damage to your metrics
ERR (Engagement Rate by Reach) uses your total subscriber count as the denominator. If 20% of your subscribers are deleted accounts that can't physically open a post, your real engagement among living users is 20–25% higher than what the numbers show. To an advertiser running a manual check, your channel looks underperforming. To recommendation algorithms, same thing.
Channels older than three years routinely find that 10–20% of their subscriber count consists of deleted accounts.
How TGuard's scan works
TGuard iterates through every subscriber in your channel and queries the Telegram API for each one: is this account still active? Any that return a "deleted" status get recorded in TGuard's database. For a channel with 50,000 subscribers this takes a few minutes. When it's done, you get a notification with the exact count of deleted accounts found. The scan is rate-limited to once per day per channel.
Running the cleanup
After the scan completes, the cleanup option becomes available. TGuard bans all the identified deleted accounts — banning is the only way to actually remove them, since a normal unsubscribe doesn't work on deactivated accounts. After processing the known list, TGuard runs another pass through all current channel members to catch any that weren't in the database. This loop repeats until a full pass finds zero deleted accounts.
You get a final report with the total number removed. Your subscriber count will drop. That's the point.
Steps to run it
- Open @channel_guardian_bot and select your channel.
- Tap "Scan Deleted" — wait for the notification with results.
- Once you have the scan results, tap "Clean Up Deleted".
- Wait for the final report showing total accounts removed.