Photo: Twitter screenshot
Clout chasing on social media for views and likes that could potentially result in a financial payoff can be deadly. YouTube pranksters have taken to doing extreme pranks on strangers that are potentially dangerous for everyone involved. Recently on YouTube, an unidentified personality decided it would make for good Internet entertainment to pour fake gasoline on cars in an undisclosed parking lot. Well, one of the car owners wasn’t too happy and pulled out a gun on the prankster.
The video of the incident has gone viral on Reddit and Twitter and shows the streamer walking through a parking lot with a gasoline canister, pouring the liquid that appears to be gasoline onto vehicles he passes. He was actually pouring out water.
But one car owner was not to happy about having anything poured onto his car and he confronted the live streamer with a gun. The prankster tells the man it was just water and a prank, but for content’s sake the prankster eggs the armed man on by saying he was “burning their car down,” Unilad reported.
The streamer says: “F*k your car, man. It’s over.”
The man answers back, “It better be water, partner. Or you’re one dead son of a btch…You almost died, you stupid son of a b*tch.”
While it is unknown how the confrontation ended, other social media pranks have ended with people hurt or dead.
In April, Tanner Cook, a YouTuber known for pranking people, was shot at a Washington, D.C.-area mall. Cook, who appears on the “Classified Goons” YouTube channel, was playing a prank when a man shot him in the abdomen. A 31-year-old man named Alan W. Colie was arrested for allegedly shooting the 21-year-old Cook at Dulles Town Center Mall Food Court. He was charged with aggravated malicious wounding, use of a firearm in the commission of a felony, and discharging a firearm within a building.
“I was playing a prank and a simple, practical joke, and this guy didn’t take it very well,” he told CBS News Washington D.C. affiliate WUSA, adding that the shooter didn’t say anything to him.
“Classified Goons” play pranks in public, and they have 41.5K subscribers.
In February 2021, 20-year-old YouTube prankster Timothy Wilks was shot dead after his failed prank for his channel. He participated in a robbery prank in Nashville, Tennessee. In 2019, a prank by 24-year-old twins Alan and Alex Stokes were doing a prank bank robbery in Irvine, California. Wearing black ski masks and holding duffle bags of cash, they called an Uber, which the driver refused upon arrival. But a bystander believed the twins were carjacking the Uber and called the police. The twins were charged with one felony count of false imprisonment affected by violence, menace, fraud, or deceit, and if they were found guilty, they would have faced four years in jail, HITC reported. As of 2021, the YouTubers have not been punished for their prank.
The latest prank trend happening in London is for live streamers to enter the homes of strangers, according to a Twitter post by Daily Loud.
Photo: Twitter screenshot
