The evening of August 24, 2024. A private Embraer Legacy 600 out of Baku touched down at Le Bourget — and French authorities detained the founder of Telegram. More details surfaced the next day: France had opened a criminal case against Pavel Durov over violations of the law committed by the messenger's users.
Two years on, the case has yet to reach trial: the charges, the defense insists, remain unproven to this day. The pressure, meanwhile, has only grown — it now comes at Durov from France, Russia, Australia and India. Here is how it all happened, and what these two years have cost the Telegram and TON ecosystems.
How the jet from Baku landed
The first story went up on TF1's site at 20:24. The flight itself was pieced together by enthusiasts after the fact, from ADS-B data: out of Baku around 12:00 UTC, wheels down at Le Bourget at 17:31.
Three police officers were waiting at the gate, according to Politico's reconstruction. The first thing Durov told them was that he had flown in for dinner with Emmanuel Macron — the Élysée later said the president knew nothing about it and was on vacation. His one phone call went to the billionaire Xavier Niel, co-owner of Le Monde. Neither name helped. The next four days — more than 90 hours — passed in questioning at the ONAF anti-fraud offices in Ivry-sur-Seine. Traveling with him were a bodyguard and Julia Vavilova, "a 24-year-old crypto instructor and social media influencer from Dubai," as the French press introduced her.
One investigator made no effort to hide his satisfaction: "Enough of Telegram's impunity." What surprised sources close to the case was something else: Durov knew France wanted him — and flew in anyway. "Perhaps out of a sense of impunity."
The case didn't start in August
The backstory, which Politico assembled from case files, begins with an undercover operation. An agent working under a pseudonym had been messaging a suspected child sex offender on Telegram; when investigators asked the platform who the man was, they got silence. On February 8, 2024, OFMIN — the police unit for crimes against children — opened a preliminary investigation into Pavel Durov and his brother Nikolai. On March 25, search warrants went out for both brothers. The file carried its own statistics: the National Gendarmerie alone had logged 2,460 requests to Telegram that went unanswered.
So no trap snapped shut on August 24 — Durov walked in through the front door. As one French security expert put it, landing at Le Bourget is like knocking and saying, "it's me."
"Libérez Pavel"
While Durov sat through his questioning, a mythology assembled itself around the arrest. Elon Musk led the charge with a "free Pavel" video that drew 42 million views; Robert F. Kennedy Jr. piled in, and libertarian networks lost no time casting Durov as a martyr for free speech.
A fake ran alongside the outrage: the UAE, the story went, had canceled an order for 80 Rafale fighter jets to punish France. Clips dressed in counterfeit Al Jazeera branding pulled in more than eight million views before TF1's fact-checkers took the forgery apart. It reached the point where Macron did something he rarely does — posted on X to remind everyone that French justice is independent.
On August 28, Durov was brought before investigating judges and indicted on counts running from complicity in distributing child sexual abuse material, drug trafficking and organized fraud to refusing to hand over data for lawfully authorized intercepts — by his own later count, "over a dozen charges, each carrying up to 10 years in prison." The terms of release: €5 million bail, a ban on leaving France, and check-ins at a police station twice a week. "It is absurd to think that the head of a social network is being charged with criminal acts that do not concern him, either directly or indirectly," his lawyer told reporters. On the first weekend after his release, Paris Match caught Durov and Vavilova strolling the Champs-Élysées.
What happened to the coin
The market moved faster than the lawyers. In the hour the jet sat on the ground, TON traded at $6.78; by the morning of August 25 it was $5.69 — 16% gone overnight. What followed was not a crash but a long slide: $5.64 a month after the arrest; $3.33 by March 2025, when Durov was first allowed to leave — half the pre-arrest level; $3.38 by the first anniversary. On February 24, 2026, the day Russia opened its own case against Durov, the coin traded at $1.34, its low-water mark of those weeks. Today, after the rebrand to GRAM and the treasury fund's Nasdaq listing, it sits around $1.5 — down 77–78% from that fateful evening two years ago.
To be fair, blaming the criminal case for all of it would be dishonest — nearly every altcoin took the same haircut over those two years. But two facts hold. The night of August 25, 2024, brought one of the sharpest single-day drops in the coin's history, and none of its attempted recoveries coincided with good news out of Paris.
| GRAM · Gram | At publish 24 Aug 2024 | +1 month 23 Sept 2024 |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $6.78 | $5.64 |
| Market cap | $17.15B | $14.33B |
| Supply | 2.53B | 2.54B |
Figures recorded by the newsroom on the dates shown.
Where the numbers come from
The prices are real, pulled from DefiLlama's historical archive: an hourly point for the evening of August 24, 2024 ($6.78 at 18:00 UTC, with the jet already at Le Bourget) and daily closes for the rest of the trajectory. Free APIs keep no market cap or circulating supply for 2024 dates, so those are estimated as price × the publicly known circulating supply (~2.53B coins in late August 2024, ~2.54B a month later). At the time of the arrest the coin was still called Toncoin (TON); it took the GRAM ticker on June 1, 2026 — same coin, same CoinGecko id, so the price series is continuous.
Year one: testimony and the personal cost
Durov said nothing for twelve days. Then, on September 5, came his first statement — 22 million views. He had handed his phone to investigators; he rejected the accusations; and "using laws from the pre-smartphone era to charge a CEO with crimes committed by third parties on the platform he manages is a misguided approach." But he gave ground too: the audience had grown to 950 million, "growing pains" had made the platform easier to abuse — "I made it my personal goal to significantly improve things in this regard."
The words became product. In the fall of 2024 Telegram updated its terms of service: given a valid court order, the platform now discloses an IP address and a phone number — while insisting it has never disclosed a single private message in 12 years. In December 2024, at his first questioning before the judges, Durov said he had not built Telegram "for criminals," though he admitted their presence — "a minimal fraction" of the audience — "has also increased." Telegram also removed People Nearby — the feature that showed other Telegram users and location-based local chats in a list built from their geoposition.
The personal cost barely made the wires. In October 2024, Julia Vavilova wrote on her channel that she had learned she was pregnant when she was already in Paris — amid the searches and interrogations, under a wave of harassment and conspiracy theories — and that at ten weeks the doctors could no longer find a heartbeat. On October 5 she underwent surgery. Durov learned that the child had been lost from his lawyer — in the middle of those same four days of detention.
Spring brought a thaw. On March 17, 2025, Durov returned to Dubai — "the process is ongoing, but it feels great to be home" — thanking the investigating judges for allowing the trip. On June 19, 2025, his judicial supervision was formally eased: he could live in Dubai and check in once every two weeks in France. His first-anniversary post carried the core formula of his defense: "Arresting a CEO of a major platform over the actions of its users was not only unprecedented — it was legally and logically absurd." And a closing promise: "We'll keep fighting — and we will win."
Year two: France stalls, Russia catches up
The case's second year played out as a strange mirror of the first. In August 2024, Moscow had offered Durov consular protection — he declined — and Russian officials loudly decried France's "assault on free speech." By 2026 everything had flipped: Russia set about strangling Telegram with restrictions, and on February 24, 2026, it opened a criminal case against Durov for "aiding terrorism."
It escalated from there. In late February, Durov moved from Dubai to Europe. In April he put Telegram's audience in Russia, which now blocks the app, at 65 million people a day — all of it over VPNs: "welcome to the Digital Resistance." On July 30, 2026, Russia designated him a terrorist, complete with a formal ban on "publishing information on the Internet," which Durov himself mocked: "Russian officials have clearly got confused about who can ban whom from the Internet."
France, meanwhile, neither closed the case nor moved it forward. Back in September 2025, Durov had accused French intelligence of trying to trade "the judge's goodwill" for censorship of Moldovan channels ahead of the elections — Telegram, he said, refused. And in April 2026, after the U.S. Department of Justice declined to assist the French investigation into Elon Musk, Durov summed it all up: "In Macron's France, being investigated is the new Légion d'honneur."
Where the case stands
On July 8, 2026, Durov — black hoodie, sneakers — was at the Paris judicial court by 10 a.m. for his fourth round of questioning since 2024: six-plus hours on the messenger's "possible complicity" in its users' crimes. His lawyers were blunt: "Nearly two years after the indictment, there is still not a single element establishing the merit of the accusations" — appeals have been filed both in France and before European courts. The prosecution, for its part, records what Telegram itself happily concedes: cooperation with French requests has improved. "The only thing that changed after Mr. Durov was taken into custody is that the French authorities started addressing their judicial requests to Telegram correctly," the company says.
There is still no trial date. The precedent, though, has metastasized: the Paris prosecutor's office has opened investigations around X, Kick and TikTok.
