Telegram Phone Number Checker

[mild musk]

Hey folks! This post is a place for tech contributors to discuss the telegram-phone-number-checker CLI

I've been looking to make some improvements. I just made a smallish PR to improve the returned values for when a user was last online if anyone wants to review/sanity check it - https://github.com/bellingcat/telegram-phone-number-checker/pull/25

PS I think it may be time someone closes this open 3 year old PR - https://github.com/bellingcat/telegram-phone-number-checker/pull/4

[mild musk]

@ebon violet Ive been told to pester you about getting PR reviews 🙃

[ebon violet]

Hey @mild musk thanks for this contribution, I'll review it in the next couple of days! and indeed that old PR was staying around as inspiration that is no longer relevant 🙂

[mild musk]

Oh dude I can implement in/out files as my next thing, provided thats something people want

[ebon violet]

Just reviewed and approved, added 1 line of code to close the telethon client otherwise the program would hand due to the unfinished event loop.

[mild musk]

I have another branch that introduces a context manager that automatically closes the connection when the with block exits. I’ll make a PR with that as my next contribution.

Thanks for reviewing and for adding that change!

[torpid escarp]

Hey tech community at bellingcat!

I've been lurking here for a while now and have been following your research with great interest. I popped in first to say thanks for all the amazing work that you're doing. I'm a developer that would love to help and contribute to the various tools you create for the community (or even help people create their own). Recently inspired by your telegram-number-checker, I thought (as a rust developer) to port it over to rust, which has the small added value of working without a python environment. Following the Bellingcat tool creation guidelines, I also prototyped a graphical version that I'd love some feedback on before making a beta release. Both are up on the repo here: https://github.com/orph3usLyre/telechecker (and are completely open-source) - for those interested!

Thanks again 🎉

[mild musk]

Very cool!

[ebon violet]

This is great, and really appreciate the GUI development and documentation effort 🙌

[steel valley]

Hello everyone. May I ask if this library can check a file of 5000 phone numbers with a telegram account? And does it have a telegram limit error?

[mild musk]

Only one way to find out

[hollow grove]

You are likely to hit an error (FloodException)

Some folk have documented this here on the repository: https://github.com/bellingcat/telegram-phone-number-checker/issues/32

@steel valley, I'm interested in your use case if you can share more. Are you using this tool for marketing?

[mellow glade]

hi! i made a small PR (https://github.com/bellingcat/telegram-phone-number-checker/pull/51) to check profiles by username. I understand this is a phone number checker and the number will be hidden in most cases, but on the way i found it useful to get user ID and profile pic

[void orbit]

If you have a partial number (for example from a “forgot password” check on a social media of the person you’re researching) you can run all phone numbers that could match the partial and see which one is linked to an account with the name of the person you’re looking for

Or at least, that’s a potential method I can think of