Telegram Group and its wholly owned subsidiary TON Issuer have agreed to return more than $1.2 billion in ill-gotten gains to investors and pay an $18.5 million civil penalty to resolve Securities and Exchange Commission charges that Telegram’s unregistered offering of digital tokens called “Grams” violated federal securities laws.

Jaclyn Jaeger is a freelance contributor to Compliance Week after working for the company for 15 years. She writes on a wide variety of topics, including ethics and compliance, risk management, legal,...