Youtuber Sentenced To 15 Months For Feeding Homeless Man Oreos

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Youtuber Gets 15 Months In Jail For Prank On A Homeless Man

A Youtuber by the name of ReSet is facing some serious consequences for a prank he did on his channel back in early 2017.

After scraping the filling out of some Oreos and replacing it with toothpaste to give the cookiesto a homeless man, Judge Rosa Aragonés sentenced ReSet—whose real name is Kanghua Ren—to 15 months in prison. He also ordered him to pay €20,000 ($22,400) in damages to his victim and ordered that he shut down his YouTube channel and other social media accounts for the next five years. But as the New York Times points out, he’s unlikely to serve any time behind bars, since Spanish law normally allows sentences under two years to be suspended for first-time offenders in nonviolent crimes.

ReSet chose to do this gag after being challenged by one of his followers to prank someone with toothpaste-filled Oreos. He found his unsuspecting victim–a man identified only as Gheorghe L.–begging outside of a Lidl supermarket in Barcelona, which is where he gave him the tampered-with cookies and a €20 bill. “Maybe I’ve gone a bit far,” the Youtuber reckoned in the now-deleted video. “But look at the positive side: this will help him clean his teeth. I think he hasn’t cleaned them since he became poor.”

After receiving criticism for that video, ReSet went back to the Lidl and found Gheorghe again, giving him another €20—and he also offered €300 to the man’s daughter, in an attempt to convince the family not to take legal action. “People exaggerate over jokes in the street on a beggar, when surely if it’s done to a normal person they wouldn’t say anything,” he said in a follow-up video.

But on Friday, Judge Aragonés ruled that the original Oreo video was “a clear and unambiguous act of humiliating content” which caused “physical suffering” to the victim. After learning that ReSet earned €2,000 in advertising revenue from the video, she ordered him to pay ten times that amount in compensation to Gheorghe.