Telegram questioned by Ofcom after arsonist who targeted Starmer-linked properties recruited on app

Telegram is facing questions from Ofcom over how it detects and prevents illegal incitement after a Ukrainian man was found guilty of carrying out arson attacks on a car and property associated with Keir Starmer.

A spokesperson for the regulator said it had contacted the messaging app “to seek further clarification” because the arsonist had been directed on Telegram by a handler linked to Russia.

Roman Lavrynovych, 22, was convicted of conspiring with others to commit arson attacks in May 2025 at two properties linked to Starmer, and setting ablaze a Toyota the prime minister once owned in a street in north London.

He and Stanislav Carpiuc, 27, a Ukrainian-born Romanian national who was found guilty of one count of arson, are due to be sentenced on Friday.

The trial heard that Lavrynovych and others had been offered payment to set fire to a car and two houses linked to Starmer via Telegram by a mysterious person named El Money, or “Hroshi” in Ukrainian, who communicated in Russian and Ukrainian.

Reports in the Financial Times and BBC on Monday suggested Lavrynovych had been recruited several months earlier. The El Money account had links to a sabotage network based in Russia.

The Online Safety Act places broad risk assessment and safety duties on social media companies to mitigate the risk of Britons encountering “illegal content”, giving them the responsibility to decide whether content on their networks breaks British laws.

Police recovered more than 320 messages between El Money and Lavrynovych on Telegram dating back to September 2024. The anonymous handler, writing in Russian, offered Lavrynovych £3,000 in cryptocurrency if he set the fires, filmed them and got them on the news.

After the arson attacks, El Money told Lavrynovych to leave the UK. “Look, you attacked the home of a very high-ranking person in Britain,” El Money wrote on Telegram. “I’ll send you money, you need to leave the city.”

Telegram is run by Russian-born Pavel Durov, a self-avowed libertarian who left the country in 2017 and relocated himself and the company to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.

The app had been widely used in Russia though is now in effect blocked there after a Kremlin crackdown in April.

It remains widely used in Ukraine, though military and government officials have been banned from using it on their work phones for the past two years amid concerns it was enabling Russian spying and disinformation.

Ofcom’s role is to make sure apps including Telegram have appropriate measures in place to comply with their legal duties, rather than telling social media networks which specific posts or accounts they should take down.

An Ofcom spokesperson confirmed Telegram had been contacted in what was described informally as a pre-investigation. Telegram did not respond to a request for comment.

In April, the regulator began an investigation into whether Telegram was doing enough to prevent the sharing of child sexual abuse material.

At the time, Telegram said it had “virtually eliminated” child sexual material through “world-class detection algorithms and cooperation with NGOs” and that Ofcom’s accusation was false.