YouTuber fed homeless man toothpaste-filled Oreos as a prank. Now he could go to jail
A 20-year-old Barcelona-based YouTuber who filmed himself replacing the icing in Oreo cookies with toothpaste and then handing a package of them to a homeless man could face up to two years in jail for performing a "crime against moral integrity," The Telegraph reported.
Kanghua Ren, who goes by the name "ReSet" on YouTube, filmed the video in January 2017 but deleted it shortly after that, The Independent reported.
The news site obtained a copy of the video, in which Ren appears to scrape the sweet icing out from the middle of an Oreo cookie before replacing it with toothpaste. He appears to do the same to at least two other cookies before putting a total of five cookies into their packaging.
The video then cuts to outside on the street. "Hello sir, do you need help?" Ren asks a man sitting on the sidewalk in Spanish. He gives the man some money, then asks whether he is hungry before handing over what appears to be the package of Oreos. "Thank you very much," the man says.
"Look at the positive side: this will help him clean his teeth. I think he hasn’t cleaned them since he became poor," Ren said in another part of the video, according to the Spanish newspaper El Pais.
It's a common prank. A search for "Oreo Toothpaste Prank" returns nearly 70,000 results. But Ren's version of the trick struck many as cruel.
Ren's video set off a deluge of criticism and even prompted a petition on Change.org to shut down his channel, which had more than 1 million subscribers before he switched to a new one. The petition has garnered about 125,000 signatures so far.
After learning about the video, police found the homeless man, identified only as Gheorge L., and asked him what had happened, the Spanish website 20Minutos reported. Police say the man told agents he had begun feeling sick after eating the cookies and that he had vomited five minutes later, according to El Pais.
Police say Ren had returned and offered the man $371 worth of euros not to talk about the incident, and returned again later with blankets and a camera intending to spend the night outside on the streets, the paper reported.
Ren was arrested and released on a $2,475 bail, slightly less than the $2,698 in euros prosecutors said Ren made in advertising off the original video, according to 20Minutos. Now state prosecutors are pushing for Ren to receive two years in jail and to pay $37,000 in euros in restitution to Gheorge L., according to The Telegraph. He is still awaiting a sentence.
Ren has continued to make videos in the meantime, including one where he said he spent two days sleeping on the streets.
Other YouTubers have found themselves in hot water for videos as well, including one man who was charged with a hate crime for teaching his pug to do a Nazi salute. Another YouTuber, Logan Paul, faced national scorn after posting a video that showed him laughing after finding a dead body in a Japanese forest.
This story was originally published April 18, 2018 at 11:23 AM with the headline "YouTuber fed homeless man toothpaste-filled Oreos as a prank. Now he could go to jail."