Inside the Telegram ‘drug rape’ chat group that shocked Germany

Early last year, Ivy*, a Chinese student living in Germany, got a phone call from the police. At first, she thought it was a scam. An officer said they needed her help with an investigation involving someone she once knew. What followed turned her world upside down.

The police told her that her former boyfriend, identified in court documents as Tong Z, had been investigated for sexual assault and covert photography. Then came the tougher blow: police showed her a number of nude photos Tong Z had secretly taken of her while she was asleep. Ivy, now 27, recognised herself, though she had no memory of the moment.

“When I saw that, I was speechless … I felt like I couldn’t breathe any more,” she says. “In the photos, I looked like a ‘prey’.”

Ivy had briefly dated Tong Z, a fellow Chinese student in Germany. She is one of 11 women the 26-year-old sexually assaulted, according to German court documents. Between 2019 and 2024, Tong Z covertly took intimate photos or videos of multiple women from his social circle when they were asleep, showering or getting dressed at multiple residences in Germany and during trips to Poland, Denmark and China.

He even used a spare key to let himself into his neighbour’s home in Berlin, where he installed a hidden camera in her bathroom. In 2024, he raped a woman and filmed the process. The victim, who has mild physical and mental disabilities, had been heavily sedated by a drink that Tong Z had laced with drugs. Like Ivy, she only learned of the abuse when the police contacted her.

Last year, a Berlin court sentenced Tong Z to five years and nine months in prison for aggravated rape, dangerous bodily harm and violation of personal privacy. The case had echoes of the crimes of serial rapist Zhenhao Zou, 29, a Chinese student jailed in 2025 for life for drugging and raping 10 women in the UK and China.

But Tong Z was not acting alone. Further court rulings this year found he was one of eight members of a Telegram group called “German Driving School”. Within the group, members used coded terms to discuss drugging and raping women: “fuel” meant anaesthetic agents and sedatives, and “car” was the code name for their targets. The men – all but one of whom were Chinese nationals – also filmed their assaults, shared the footage and celebrated each other’s crimes.

Three of the men, including Tong Z, have now been convicted in connection with the Telegram group. Dapeng Z, a 44-year-old IT engineer and the group’s admin, was sentenced to 14 years in prison for aggravated rape and attempted murder. Zhongyi J, a 28-year-old Chinese student, received more than 11 years for similar charges. German courts ruled that the two men had knowingly administered life-threatening doses of drugs to their victims.

The revelations have sent shockwaves across China and the global Chinese diaspora, as most of the victims were also women of Chinese heritage living in Europe.

But Dr Juliane Kloess, a senior lecturer in forensic clinical psychology at the University of Glasgow, says the rise of online rape communities is a global problem rather than one specific to men from any particular country. She says the accessibility and perceived anonymity of the internet “have allowed people to detach from how they would normally behave in the physical world”, especially around sexual abuse and other behaviours that are outside social norms.

According to court documents, Tong Z admitted to all the charges and said he “felt immense shame” in a personal statement.

In the statement, Tong Z described how difficult he found it to form social relationships, particularly with Germans. He had arrived in Germany as a 15-year-old in 2015 to attend boarding school and drifted between several cities in the following years. By the time he was arrested in late 2024, he still had not completed his degree. He had no close friends and spent most of his free time alone in front of a computer, his isolation deepening as the years went on.

“I became absorbed in digital images, videos and fantasies, without recognising that doing so could hurt real people,” he said.

For people who feel marginalised in society, Dr Kloess says being part of an online sexual abuse network, such as the Telegram group in the German cases, can offer a sense of belonging and empowerment, especially if there is an “exclusivity” aspect to it.

In Ivy’s memory, Tong Z had once been a “model” boyfriend. He was tidy, considerate and seemed empathetic. He also loved to cook, especially Sichuanese food. She says she now finds it hard to tell whether his past displays of thoughtfulness were genuine affection, a deliberate act, or even premeditation for a crime.

“Was he cooking for me so he could drug me? I keep asking myself: did I miss something? How did I end up dating someone this terrible?”

On Telegram, Tong Z’s username was “God by day, devil by night”. As the name suggests, the image he projected in public stood in stark contrast to his crimes documented in the verdict. In his chat with Dapeng Z, the admin of the Telegram group, Tong Z coached him on how to film sexual assaults: “You can bring a GoPro plus a phone, in case your hands are full.”

The two men exchanged more than 2,000 messages on Telegram in less than a year. Tong Z claimed in the chat that he would wait a year or two after filming his victims before using the footage to blackmail them. “[They] cried and begged me to delete it, but it never occurred to them to go to the police,” he said. He described how one woman he had blackmailed cried while being coerced into sex with him, and said her crying made him “extremely aroused”.

In November 2024, Dapeng Z was the first in the Telegram group to be arrested, after several of his victims reported him to the police. They found the group on his devices, identifying Tong Z and several other suspects based in Germany. Police soon arrested Tong Z, and a search of his residence turned up condoms, women’s underwear, syringes, prescription sedatives in an under-bed storage and hard drives containing more than 2TB of footage. In the hard drives, police found Tong Z had created a separate folder for each victim.

The court determined that Tong Z’s motive stemmed from “dehumanising misogyny”.

Since learning about Tong Z’s crimes, Ivy says she has experienced symptoms of depression and PTSD and has been seeing a psychiatrist to regain a sense of control over her life.

“I really want to ask him – why did he do these things?”