Following recent legal crackdowns that successfully shut down major illicit streaming portals like HiAnime and 9anime, viewers looking for free content have quickly migrated to alternative platforms. Chief among them is Telegram, which has rapidly evolved into a massive epicenter for unauthorized media distribution.
According to findings published by TorrentFreak, a joint academic investigation by researchers from the University of Texas at Arlington and Louisiana State University highlighted Telegram’s role in global video piracy. By taking advantage of the app’s native file-sharing capabilities—which allow individual uploads of up to 2GB—users can seamlessly share entire television and anime episodes directly inside chat groups.
To gauge the scale of the issue, the study analyzed 1,057 Telegram channels containing roughly 209,000 distinct posts made between December 2023 and January 2026. Utilizing locally operated Large Language Models (LLMs) to sort through post metadata, the researchers verified that Japanese animation was among the most heavily shared content genres on the messaging platform.
Telegram Emerges as New Hub for Anime Piracy Following Recent Crackdown
Among the 983 active infringement channels reviewed, investigators cataloged 19,033 unique pirated titles that collectively pulled in an astounding 4.85 billion views.
Japanese animation studio Toei ranked as the most heavily targeted copyright holder on the network, representing 17% of all recorded titles with a total of 5,862 entries. This comes as little surprise, given that two of Toei’s flagship properties, One Piece and Dragon Ball, remain the most pirated anime franchises in history. Toei was followed closely by Netflix at 15% and Warner Bros at 12.4% of compromised properties.
Stifling this kind of illicit distribution remains exceptionally difficult. Users are frequently redirected through backup feeds, directory networks, and third-party cloud storage providers like GoFile, TeraBox, and Terashare. Furthermore, automated bots often purge download links minutes after they are posted to evade detection and tracking.
The research also highlighted the use of sophisticated retrieval bots. These automated systems let users query specific titles through interactive menus, generating multi-page episode directories with direct download options ranging from standard 480p up to 1080p high definition. Additionally, investigators spotted at least seven distinct channels dedicated solely to sharing multilingual anime material.
Beyond video files, certain channels were found trading stolen user login credentials for legal streaming platforms like Netflix and Crunchyroll, alongside guides on utilizing VPNs to bypass regional restrictions.
Japan Suffers Losses of Over US$3 Billion Due to Telegram
Altogether, the study estimates that these Telegram networks cost copyright holders a staggering $17.49 billion globally, with Japanese media alone accounting for $3.72 billion in damages. These losses pose a significant obstacle to the Japanese government’s ambitious economic strategy, which aims to elevate creative industry exports to 20 trillion yen (roughly $125 billion) by 2033 by making video games, manga, and anime central pillars of international expansion. Meanwhile, American media companies suffered an estimated $8.17 billion in losses.
This growing concern over Telegram coincides with an aggressive push from international coalitions and rights holders to dismantle unauthorized web platforms, resulting in numerous high-profile domain closures over the past year. Beyond just the streaming portals themselves, authorities are increasingly targeting backend video scrapers, hosting infrastructure, and developer tools that prop up these networks, making it harder for pirate sites to maintain operations.
As traditional streaming sites struggle to stay online, enforcement efforts have pivoted toward download-centric hubs, including Nyaa and messaging apps like Telegram. To combat the latter, the study’s authors developed Anti-RIP—an artificial intelligence tool built to track and evaluate copyright-infringing communities in real time.
Between February 3 and April 10, 2026, the AI scanner reviewed 249,133 public channels, helping facilitate the removal of 524 piracy channels and 71 bots after submitting evidence reports directly to Telegram and affected animation studios. While researchers noted that the detection system boasts a 98% accuracy rate during controlled trials, manual checks of 1,000 sample posts did reveal a small handful of four false positives.