On April 10, 2026, a groundbreaking investigation by Wired revealed that men are actively purchasing off-the-shelf spy tools and hacking services to surveil their wives, girlfriends, and former partners.
Researchers at AI Forensics analyzed nearly 2.8 million messages across 16 Italian and Spanish Telegram communities over six weeks, discovering a thriving marketplace where channel access costs as little as €20 (approximately $23) and monthly subscriptions start at €5. The findings paint a troubling picture of how commercial surveillance technology has become the ultimate domestic abuse enabler, available to anyone with a smartphone and a grudge.
The investigation documented over 24,000 community members exchanging more than 82,723 images, videos, and audio files, with over 18,000 references to spying or spy content. As if scrolling through a particularly depressing catalog, Telegram posts advertised services ranging from “professional hacking on commission” offering access to phone galleries and extraction of photos and videos, to bots specifically designed for spying on “girl’s gallery.” It’s almost impressive how efficiently these platforms have monetized jealousy.
Stalkerware Market: The Domestic Violence Crisis Nobody Wants to Regulate
The ease with which anyone can purchase surveillance capabilities would be alarming enough, but the domestic abuse context makes it genuinely disturbing. The majority of this violence is directed toward people the perpetrators already know, with victims often named, tagged, and made locatable via shared profile links.
Silvia Semenzin, a researcher at AI Forensics, noted: “We tend to forget that most victims are ordinary women who sometimes don’t even know that their pictures are shared or manipulated in these types of channels.” One might assume that at some point, basic human decency would kick in. One would be wrong.
As TechCrunch reported, TheTruthSpy — a Vietnam-based phone surveillance operation that has been running for nearly a decade — exemplifies everything wrong with this industry. The company suffered its fourth major security lapse when a vulnerability allowed anyone to reset user passwords and hijack accounts, exposing thousands of victims’ sensitive personal data. When researchers contacted director Van (Vardy) Thieu about the flaw, he reportedly said the source code was “lost” and he cannot fix the bug. Nothing says “trust us with your most intimate data” quite like “we literally don’t know where our code is.”
The pattern is depressingly consistent across the stalkerware ecosystem. In 2021, TheTruthSpy exposed data of 400,000 victims including private messages, photos, call logs, and location history. A second breach in late 2023 leaked data of 50,000 additional victims. TechCrunch’s investigation also revealed that TheTruthSpy relied on a “massive money-laundering operation” using forged documents and false identities to circumvent credit card processor restrictions, funneling millions of dollars in illicit payments.
Spy Tools for Domestic Abuse: A Regulatory Vacuum
Despite the documented harm, regulation remains essentially nonexistent. Telegram, with over 1 billion monthly active users, positions itself as a free speech platform while its founder Pavel Durov faces criminal investigation in France relating to alleged criminal activity on the platform. The company claims to remove “millions of pieces of content daily using custom AI tools” — though apparently none of those tools are particularly interested in stopping men from coordinating domestic surveillance.
Adam Dodge, founder of EndTAB (End Technology-Enabled Abuse), observed: “Any platform or app that can be used to harm women and girls will be. Telegram stands out because it offers anonymity, speed, and large networks of like-minded users.”
Moreover, Salvatore Romano, head of research at AI Forensics, stated that these networks represent “a very small sample of a much larger phenomenon,” adding: “We can probably say that without Telegram, it would be much harder for these people to have such a big user base.” Researchers and experts are calling for stricter regulation under Europe’s Digital Services Act, suggesting Telegram should be classified as a “very large online platform” subject to greater accountability.
Similar image-sharing networks have been documented across Germany, Portugal, and China, where some groups have grown to include up to 65,000 members. An Italian Facebook group called “Mia Moglie” (“My Wife”) was only shut down in 2025 after men brazenly posted images of women in their lives. One has to wonder how many other groups simply rebranded and moved elsewhere. The stalkerware market boom suggests the answer is: quite a lot, and with relative impunity.