How to Scrape Telegram Channels in 2026 — Free MCP + Apify Actor (No Login Required)

Telegram has become one of the most valuable intelligence sources on the internet. Crypto alpha, B2B leads, community signals, competitor monitoring — it's all flowing through public channels right now. The problem? There's no official Telegram API for scraping public channels without a registered account. Every guide you find either requires a phone number, developer app credentials, or hits rate limits within minutes. This guide shows you how to scrape any public Telegram channel in 2026 — no account, no API key, no rate limits — using a free Apify actor and an MCP server that works directly inside Claude and Cursor. What You'll Be Able to Do By the end of this guide you'll be able to: Scrape messages from any public Telegram channel Extract emails, phone numbers, and links for lead generation Get subscriber counts and channel metadata Discover related channels via forwarded message analysis Do all of this from inside Claude Desktop or Cursor with zero code Option 1: Use the Hosted M