In March earlier this year, two people from the YouTube channel Trollstation were arrested for a bomb hoax they planned and filmed for a prank video. The video was never uploaded because the cameraman, Danh Van Le, and an unnamed teenager who was assisting him were arrested for suspicion of placing the bomb hoax in London. The “prank” consisted of the teenager going up to strangers with a briefcase. He would open up the briefcase and show them the clock that was inside. Then, he would drop the briefcase and start running away. The clock referenced the incident that made international news when teenager Ahmed Mohamed was arrested for making a clock that his school mistook for a bomb.
Van Le was also held
accountable for two other hoaxes done at the Tate and National
Portrait Gallery, also in London. This “prank” consisted of a few
men wearing nylon masks pretending to steal paintings from the
gallery. You can watch that one here:
Van Le was sentenced
to nine months in jail and the teenager that assisted him was
sentenced to a 12-month intense referral order because he's
considered a juvenile. According to a new Trollstation video, posted
on May 16, a total of 4 Trollstation members (apparently there are
many) have been arrested for similar charges.
“The judge did not
see the funny side to the prank,” said one of the Trollstation
members in their
latest video.
Of course, he didn't
see the funny side to the prank – he's a judge. The judge has to
think about all of those people in the art gallery heist video that
had no idea that this was just a prank. The people who ran in fear,
who could be seen at the end of the video still running as the
Trollstation pranksters yelled “It's a joke!” in their general
direction.
What did
Trollstation learn from this? “I'm not saying we had to go to
prison to show you, but it shows that we're authentic and original
and all our pranks are real,” said another member in their latest
video. It was also said in that video that they will continue to make
prank videos.
I can't say if the
sentence was deserved or if it should've been lighter, but what I can
say is that it is about time that a YouTube prankster gets a
real-life consequence for the harm they cause all for the sake of a
dumb prank.
Pranks can be funny.
Pranks can even be
good. But there are too many pranks on
YouTube that are not either of those things because the pranksters
are too focused on shock value and click bait instead of quality.
There are the pranks that consist of a person going up to strangers
on the street and saying something that they know will make them
angry. Then the video becomes less about getting a reaction from the
person being pranked and more about getting a reaction from the
viewer.
That's what these
Trollstation pranks and what a lot of YouTube pranks depend on: a
reaction from the viewer. The pranksters become so obsessed with
getting views that they go so far as to mimic terrorism. And that is
just one example of the crazy, stupid things that pranksters have
done to get views. Thankfully, many of the pranks on YouTube are
staged, so most of the pranks you'll see on YouTube will be done to
paid actors. But Trollstation showed us that there are still some
that are real, and they deserve to be met with real-life
consequences, whatever the justice system decides those be.
