Finally some YouTube pranksters have been brought to justice.
Four men were sentenced to jail time in the UK for a string of high profile and highly illegal YouTube pranks. The group, known as Trollstation, fake kidnapped an unwilling person and fake robbed London’s National Portrait Gallery (see above). The group entered the gallery wearing pantyhose on their heads carrying fake paintings and playing a siren sound from a loudspeaker.
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Not surprisingly these “pranks” inspired real terror in the people who witnessed them. The stunt caused visitors to frantically stampede out of the gallery, which caused one woman to pass out.
The pranksters only received about 16 to 20 weeks each for the portrait heist and a concurrent sentence of eight weeks for the kidnapping. This scourge of the Internet is nothing new. The meme “it’s a prank bro” comes from the myriad YouTube pranksters pathetically attempting to save themselves an ass beating after “pranks” that look more like felonies.
The members of Trollstation are just part of a long line of YouTube douchebags gradually one upping each other until the pranks grew into full-on crime sprees.
While most of these pranks, or social experiments as they’re sometimes called, are cheesy and fake, the real ones often escalate in to violence.
Here’s a hilarious prankster stealing a car that leads to a pummeling. Why would this hothead get angry when it’s just a prank, bruh?
Possibly one the worst came from Moe and Ethan Bradberry, who scared a poor woman close to a heart attack after faking a Craigslist ad and attempting to kidnap her. They invite her into their home before ambushing her in ski masks holding fake knives.
“We’re just filming a social experiment,” Moe reassured her. “We just wanted to raise awareness for people who buy and sell products on Craigslist, because a lot of people get raped and murdered, you know.”
These two geniuses thought the best way to raise awareness about people getting raped and murdered was to make a woman feel like she was actually about to get raped and murdered.
A sentencing for Trollstation is a good start to killing off this resilient trend of harassment pranks. Hopefully the U.S. follows the UK’s lead and starts throwing the most egregious YouTube experimenters in jail.
And who knows, maybe fellow prisoners will provide a more receptive audience for their hilarious criminal antics.
