Max has no end-to-end encryption, and “secret chats” are not encrypted. Every message is readable by VK’s servers. We captured a message in plaintext at the moment Max handed it to the cryptographic library. The “secret chat” feature is a disappearing-message timer and nothing more, under the name Telegram uses in Russia for its encrypted mode.

What Max does is set on VK’s servers, per account, without an app update. Network probing, VPN detection, voice transcription, elevated logging, the list of services allowed to receive a user’s identity: all are switched from the server, for one account or for many, with nothing shown in the interface. Two people can run the same version of Max on the same day and be running very different applications, and neither of them can tell. This is the single most important technical fact in the report. Anything we found dormant in our build can be live tomorrow for one person and no one else.

Max reports the user’s network environment to VK. When the setting that controls it is on, each time the app opens or goes to the background it looks up the device’s public IP address through up to six external services, checks whether a VPN is running, reads the mobile carrier, and tests whether a list of internet services is reachable, including the Russian state services portal. All of it goes to VK in one report. Telegram and WhatsApp were on that list until the practice was reported publicly in March 2026. Separately, Max carries a second, concealed reporting channel that takes an unrestricted list of addresses from the server and tests each one from the user’s device. We found its destination only after decoding a hostname the app stores in scrambled form. It ran nineteen times on our test phones, and one of the addresses it was told to test, Apple’s push service, appears nowhere in the app, so it can only have come from the server. The destination, trace-flow.ru, sits in VK’s own network and presented a certificate issued to VK LLC, Moscow.

Max stops working when it finds a VPN. We observed this directly: an attempt to reply to a message produced a full-screen instruction to disable the VPN, with no way around it. The check looks for a VPN on the device itself, so a VPN on a router evades it. A user who does not know that faces a forced choice between the tool that reaches independent media and the app required for state services.

Max uploads the entire address book to VK in cleartext, names paired with numbers. We captured the upload during a fresh registration. A widely cited analysis had reported that the numbers are hashed first. They are not; the routine read as a hash is a formatting normalizer.

Anyone can look up any registered phone number, and the server acts on it. The query returns the account’s identifier, display name and creation time, needs no contact relationship, and sends the person looked up no notification. Within 1.2 seconds VK’s servers began streaming that person’s real-time online status to the account that asked, and kept streaming it for over fifteen minutes. A link between two people was created by one of them looking the other up.

The server reads content, and the machinery to read more is in place. Every text message carries a flag telling the server to inspect it for links and shared content. Voice messages are transcribed on VK’s servers, not the device. During calls, according to the code, live audio is routed to an on-device model that VK supplies from its servers and can replace without an update.

The full report documents each of these with the capture or the code path behind it, and explains where our findings agree with, and where they contradict, the work of the researchers who examined Max before us.