Telegram CEO Pavel Durov was detained in France on Friday for a warrant pertaining to the messaging app, officials have said.

Reportedly, Durov was arrested due to a lack of moderation on his company’s platform, which French officials saying the app failed to co-operate with law enforcement efforts to combat drug smuggle, child sexual abuse material, and fraud.

In a statement, Telegram contested the alleged reasons for the arrest, claiming that Durov “has nothing to hide.”

“Telegram abides by EU laws, including the Digital Services Act – its moderation is within industry standards and constantly improving,” the company said.

“It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform.”

A French police source told Reuters that Durov was attested as an early step in a police investigation that alleged Telegram, and by default its chief executive, had allowed a range of crimes to proliferate on its platform due to a lack of moderators.

The national anti-fraud police uni as well as a cybersecurity unit in France are leading the investigation into Durov and Telegram, according to reports.

Durov, Russian born, founded Telegram, which is now based in Dubai. He originally left Russia in 2014 after he refused to remove opposition communities, as demanded by the government, on his VKontake social media platform, which he later sold. He now holds dual French and United Arab Emrites citizenship.

Telegram is a popular platform across Russia, Ukraine, and many Eastern European countries, offering the ability to create groups or channels of up to 200,000 members. This, however, has lead to many concerns that the platform allows the proliferation of illegal and harmful content, including criminal activity and hate speech and hate groups to spread.

The platform was directly criticised for hosting far-right groups that were responsible for organising the racist attacks across England in early August.

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It has also played a central role for both sides of the ongoing war in Ukraine, used by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy and the Russian government, as well as users on both sides to spread information, and often disinformation, regarding the conflict.

The app was temporarily shut down in Russia in 2018 after Durov refused to share personal data with the government, in an effort to protect user privacy.

It is uncertain at the moment the nature of Telegram’s lack of cooperation with French police.

Cybersecurity experts have also showed concern over Telegram’s security protocols. Unlike WhatsApp, Telegram does not offer end-to-end encryption by default, and does not offer encryption for group messages.  This means that it is easier for the company, or law enforcement, or threat actors, to access and view chats.

Further, unlike WhatsApp, Telegram uses its own in-house encryption techniques rather than the open, industry standards developed by Signal, a competing encrypted messaging platform.

The app, however, is one of the five most downloaded in the world, despite the proliferation of phishing toolkits, the lack of moderation, and it offering insights into illicit activity usually only reserved for the dark web, a report from Gaurdio revealed.

Despite not offering default end-to-end encryption and continually harbouring hate speech and illegal activity, Durov continually champions the platform as a save haven for free speech. And while he has actively denied governments the opportunity to access user data, its lack of encryption by default makes this protection a policy, rather than a technological assurance.

While Durov had issues with the Russian government, Russia still considers him a citizen, and the Russian embassy in France said it was seeking clarity from French officials on the reasons for the arrest.