How to clear the latest members from your Telegram channel/group after a bot attack

A botted ad buy or a "subscribers" service can dump thousands of fake accounts on you in one night. The fix everyone wants is simple: clear the latest members who just joined, without touching the real audience you had before. Telegram doesn't give you a button for that — here's what does.

The native way is brutal

To remove someone you open the subscriber list, long-press the account, Remove from channel, confirm. One at a time. There's no select-all, no "clear the last N who joined," no filter by join date.

I had a wave of +4,100 accounts land overnight. By hand that's ~5 seconds each — roughly 3.5 hours of tapping — and the list order doesn't even line up cleanly with join time, so you can't reliably tell the surge apart from your real subscribers. The usual "just write a script" advice runs straight into Telegram's rate limits.

Clearing the latest subscribers by join date

TGuard (@channel_guardian_bot) has a cleanup that removes members by when they joined — the last N who joined, or everyone inside a date/time window. I set the window to the surge night, the bot showed me the account table to confirm, and it cleared the batch in a couple of minutes.

One honest caveat: it's a blunt tool. Real people who joined in that same window get removed too. So before confirming, check Recent Actions — hundreds of joins with zero post views is a bot wave; real subscribers, even at 3 a.m., open at least something. If you've got organic joins mixed in, run the bot's database sweep first (it only removes accounts already flagged as bots) and use the date pass as cleanup.

Don't stop at the surge

After clearing the latest subscribers, I also ran the deleted-account cleanup — accounts that quit Telegram and just sit there dragging ERR down (often 5–12% of an older channel's base). Then I turned on the antivirus so the next farm gets blocked at the door. A one-time clear without an entry filter just means you're doing this again next month.

ERR recovered to where it was before the placement within a couple of days.

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Happy to post a screenshot of what the join-date cleanup table looks like before you confirm a removal.

tguard.pro