I’m working on a bot that needs to confirm if someone actually owns or manages a specific Telegram channel. Right now I’m trying to figure out the most reliable method to do this.
I thought about creating some kind of verification process where I send a special token to the channel owner and they have to confirm it somehow. But I can’t seem to find any Telegram Bot API method that lets me directly message channel administrators.
For regular users it’s pretty straightforward - they just need to start a chat with my bot. But channels work differently and I’m not sure how to make a channel communicate back to my bot to prove ownership.
Has anyone dealt with this before? What approaches work best for validating that someone controls a particular channel?
In my experience, verifying channel ownership can effectively be handled by using the getChatAdministrators method from the Telegram Bot API. When a user claims to own a channel, you can check the list of administrators by passing the channel ID to this method. If their user ID appears with proper permissions, that confirms their admin status. However, obtaining the channel ID initially can be a challenge. I typically suggest to users to make my bot a temporary admin to retrieve the channel details via getChat. After verification, they can remove the bot if they prefer. Additionally, you can have them post a unique verification message in the channel, then monitor it using getUpdates or webhooks to ensure they have posting rights.
another way is to ask them to forward a message from their channel to your bot. when they forward it, you can extract the channel info from the forward data and match it with their user id. works pretty well and doesnt require making your bot admin temporarily like the other method.
What worked for me was implementing a two-step verification process. First, I ask the user to add my bot to their channel as an admin with minimal permissions, just enough to post messages. Then I send a randomly generated verification code to the channel and immediately ask them to delete that message. This proves they have both the ability to receive my bot’s messages and delete content, which confirms administrative control. The key advantage is that it doesn’t rely on forwarding messages or complex API calls. Once verification is complete, they can adjust the bot’s permissions or remove it entirely. This method has been reliable across different channel types and sizes in my testing.