Every Telegram spam campaign ends in a link. The message is just the wrapper. Fake giveaways, fake support, fake jobs, pump groups, wallet drainers: all of them need your members to click something, which means blocking the link is the highest-leverage move an admin has. The catch is that the obvious block, banning URLs, stops the lazy spammers and none of the professional ones.

We build an AI moderation bot for Telegram and watch link spam evolve in real time, so this is the layered version: permissions first, filters second, detection for what the first two miss. For the wider picture, start with our full guide to stopping spam in a Telegram group.

Turn off links for new members

Telegram's group permissions can remove the ability to send links for everyone, and a moderation bot can make that conditional: no links until an account has been in the group for a day, or has posted a few normal messages. That one setting kills the most common attack, the account that joins and posts a link within seconds. In our 2026 security report 76.2 percent of scam messages were the sender's first message, and most carried a link.

Filter URLs and t.me invites

Bots like Rose, Combot and collony let you filter link patterns. Treat invite links as their own category: t.me, telegram.me, joinchat and plus-sign invites are the payload for group-hopping scams and deserve a hard block for non-admins. For ordinary URLs, allowlist the domains your community actually uses and block the rest, which is far more reliable than trying to blocklist spam domains that rotate daily.

Catch the links filters cannot see

Professional spam gets past URL filters four ways: shorteners and redirect chains, links inside images or QR codes, unicode lookalike domains, and the DM pivot, where the group post is clean and the link arrives in a private message. None of those are pattern problems. They are behavior problems, and reading behavior is what link reputation scoring and AI moderation add on top of filters: sender age, first-message timing, what the link resolves to, and whether the same account is fishing across communities.

Handling a link spam wave

When links flood in faster than you can delete, do three things in order: enable slow mode, switch on join approval, and let the bot ban on detection rather than on report. Then clear the accounts, not just the messages, using the steps in our spam bot removal guide. Deleting the links while leaving the senders inside just schedules the next wave.

Frequently asked questions

Can I completely disable links in a Telegram group?

Yes. Group permissions let you remove the ability to send links for all members, and a moderation bot can restrict it further by account age or membership time. Most groups keep links on for trusted members and off for newcomers, which blocks the majority of spam without silencing regulars.

How do I block t.me invite links in my group?

Use a bot filter for the t.me and telegram.me patterns, and add joinchat and the plus-sign invite format. Invite links are the most common spam payload on Telegram because they pull members into scam groups, so filter them separately from ordinary URLs.

Do link filters stop scam links?

Only the obvious ones. Scammers rotate domains, use shorteners, hide links in images and QR codes, and move the link into a DM after a harmless-looking post. A URL filter is necessary but it is not detection. That gap is what an AI layer that reads the whole message and the sender's behavior closes.

Why do spammers post a link and then delete it?

The post is a lure and the deletion evades review. The link is live long enough for notifications to fire and for members to click, then it vanishes so admins never see it. Bots that scan on arrival, not on report, are the only reliable answer.