Pavel Durov, the billionaire boss of messaging app Telegram, steps off his plane in France and is swarmed by a Swat team of police officers. He pulls off his shirt to reveal a torso so sculpted that it momentarily confuses his opponents before they come to their senses, cuff him and march him off to a cell. “Privacy is over!” a faceless goon shouts, zapping him with an electric current. Durov awakes to find a chip implanted in his head and the task of breaking out of a high-security prison before him.
This is the plot of Total Glitch, a game hosted on Telegram that dramatises a fictitious French prison break by a hero who recovers from bouts of intense combat with ice baths and yoga. Durov, a 41-year-old wellness evangelist who in real life recovers from bouts of intense exercise with ice baths and yoga, says he had no role in the game’s development, but he has promoted it on his channel. “Only on Telegram could independent developers pull this off . . . and the results are wild,” he wrote last October in a Telegram post viewed more than five million times.
The scenario the game imagines is not entirely far-fetched. In August 2024, Durov, who was born in Russia but has French and United Arab Emirates citizenship, was detained by French police within minutes of stepping off a private jet at Paris-Le Bourget Airport. He was held over alleged failures to moderate criminal activity on Telegram, from drug trafficking to terrorism and the dissemination of child sexual abuse material. After four days in custody, he was released and placed under formal investigation on a dozen preliminary charges and barred from leaving France. A trial, which is unlikely to come before the end of the year, could determine whether Durov will be convicted and face fines, or even a long prison sentence.