Sam Pepper’s Latest Prank is So Bad, Anonymous Has Declared War

Sam Pepper, the disgraced YouTube prankster accused of sexual harassment and rape, is back with a new video that is designed to shock and enrage you. And just like we did with Nicole Arbour (gosh, remember her?) we’ve put together a quick summary of the situation, so you can know what’s going on without giving Pepper any more views.

As always, if you need to see the original video, Google is here for you.

Pepper teamed up with Viner Colby Brock to trick their friend, fellow Viner Sam Golbach, into thinking Brock has been murdered in front of him. The stunt had the two boys kidnapped and Golbach tied to a chair, where he watched his best friend supposedly get shot in the head, and sobbed hysterically until the prank was finally revealed.

Now, we’ve been in this industry long enough to suspect every YouTube prank and “social experiment” to be completely staged at this point. Every Vine star wants to be in a movie these days and this could easily just be Golbach showing off his screaming skills so he can add it to his acting reel.

More to the point, though, the YouTube community is still so fed up with Sam Pepper from his last round of dickish behavior, the backlash to this outrageous stunt was immediate. The video quickly racked up 300,000 dislikes on YouTube and has picked up mainstream press attention as people around the world accuse him of giving an innocent person (again: probably acting) a case of PTSD.

Now there is a petition on Change.org calling on YouTube to deactivate Pepper’s channel, which over 100,000 people have signed. And Anonymous – yes, that Anonymous – has taken a break from trying to hack ISIS to threaten Pepper with “unleash[ing] fucking hell on you” if he doesn’t take the video down in the next 24 hours.

It really doesn’t seem like the internet is ready to take Sam Pepper back.