A network of Telegram channels with Russian links is encouraging UK residents to commit violent attacks on mosques and Muslims and offering cryptocurrency in return, campaigners have warned.
The channels have already been linked to real world events in the form of Islamophobic graffiti sprayed on mosques and schools in east and south London earlier this month, sometimes with the names of the groups mentioned. Those incidents are under investigation by the police.
The same groups have also been sharing PDFs containing bomb-making recipes and designs for 3D-printed weapons. Posters with QR codes for the groups and associated TikTok accounts have also appeared on British streets.
However, there has been alarm in recent weeks after a switch in the group’s language from encouraging graffiti to explicitly calling on people to carry out knife attacks.
A dossier on the channels and their apparent Russian links has been passed to counter-terrorism police and the Home Office by the campaign group Hope Not Hate, which says it is worried that the network poses a much greater threat than the incitement to violence routinely found on other extreme-right Telegram chats.
The Community Security Trust (CST) and Tell Mama, charities which respectively monitor hate crime against Jews and Muslims, have also flagged the networks and their Russian links.
Concerns over the network, which has included antisemitic comment but which has been particularly focused on fomenting anti-Muslim feeling, come amid a rise in Islamophobic assaults – which surged by 73% in 2024. A fake bomb was also left outside a mosque in north London last week.
Fears have grown that Russia is seeking to fuel social unrest in Britain and other western European states via covert digital campaigns aimed at exploiting ethnic and religious tensions.
Ken McCallum, the head of MI5, warned in October that Russian intelligence has been on a mission to generate “sustained mayhem on British and European streets”.
Gregory Davis, a senior researcher at Hope Not Hate, said: “We are concerned, given reporting of prior Russian attempts to recruit groups of people in the UK willing to carry out criminal acts here, that this network is designed to recruit people to carry out acts of violence, and that they may already be in the process of grooming people for it.
“We believe that the people running the network are using a variety of means to make direct contact with far-right British activists on the platform, and are likely to be privately encouraging them to carry out an act of terror.”
Stella Creasy, a Labour MP whose Walthamstow constituency has been targeted with graffiti, said: “These are very credible allegations of foreign interference and they need to be taken seriously.
“For some time now it has been clear at a local level that there is a concerted effort to mislead, provoke and sow divisions among communities, online and offline.
“That is playing out in communities like mine. We should take this very seriously because of the criminal activity, foreign interference in our democracy and the risk of harm it represents to residents.”
Another east London MP, Calvin Bailey, said: “These reports line up with Russia’s established strategy to attack democracy by supporting far-right hatred, and it is appalling that our community in Leyton and Wanstead may already have been impacted.”
Tell Mama’s director Iman Atta said it had flagged the Telegram channels to the police. “There is a sense of apprehension within Muslim communities and concerns about their safety, especially given the fact that Ramadan starts in a couple of a days,” she added.
Evidence linking the groups to Russia include an admin account on one of the channels sharing a screenshot from X that revealed that the X account in question had its language set to Russian, and was set to GMT+3, a time zone used in Russia and Belarus.
Other evidence includes the use of Cyrillic script in some messages, suggesting that they were translated from Russian, and two of the users most active in forwarding messages from the network to other British chat groups have also made Russian language posts in pro-Putin and anti-Ukraine Telegram chats.
An administrative account for one of the groups had posted an anti-Ukraine message, using a Russian language slur for Ukrainian people, on 19 November, but a few weeks later was attempting to pay someone in Sheffield or Rotherham to perform an unspecified task in exchange for payment.
“Hi guys, who is Rotherham or Sheffield, I need help, I’m ready to pay … I really need your help,” they asked.
Members of the groups have openly discussed “mass Qur’an burnings” and posted videos of what appear to be arson attacks, acid attacks and the testing of homemade bombs. Each channel in the network invites British citizens to contact the channel owners privately via messaging bots.
After graffiti appeared on mosques and other locations, the groups shared images of it and offered cryptocurrency for more, or even for attacks on police cars. One message read: “People who create the most beautiful graffiti on mosques will receive a gift from our movement. 100£ in any cryptocurrency.”
A Home Office spokesperson said: “National security is the first priority of any government. We take any malicious activity that might pose a significant threat to our security and public safety extremely seriously.
“We will not let the internet serve as a haven for those seeking to sow division in our communities, which is why we are working rapidly to implement the Online Safety Act. This requires social media platforms to remove illegal content including disinformation, and ultimately, protect our communities from online harms.
“We are clear though that there is no need to wait for these laws to kick in – companies should be taking action now to protect their users.”
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