YouTuber Who Tricked Homeless Man With Toothpaste-Filled Oreos Sentenced To 15 Months

• YouTuber Kanghua Ren filled Oreos with toothpaste as a prank.
• He fed them to homeless man Gheorge L who got sick and threw them up
• Spanish prosecutors charged him with a “crime against moral integrity.”
• Ren is sentenced to 15 months in prison.
• He should pay his victim $22,300 and shut down his social media channel for five years.

A YouTuber known for his viral pranks has been sentenced to prison after one prank drew major criticism from the Internet. Kanghua Ren, known to his followers as ReSet, has been sentenced to 15 months in prison after he sickened a homeless man by feeding him toothpaste-filled Oreos for a video prank.

Ren was found guilty of violating the moral integrity of the homeless man. A Barcelona court ordered Kanghua Ren to also pay $22,300 in compensation. Since he is a first-time offender, Spanish law usually suspends prison time for those sentenced to less than two years. The court, however, did order Ren’s social media accounts on YouTube and other platforms to be suspended for five years.

In the video, Kanghua Ren films himself scraping out the filling from Oreos, filling the cookies with toothpaste, then giving a package of mildly toxic snacks to a man. The incident played out in early 2017 outside a supermarket in Barcelona, Spain, where the Chinese-born Ren lives, and where authorities identified the homeless man of Romanian origin only as Gheorge L.

In the wake of the prank going viral and being widely criticized as cruel and “humiliating,” Ren reportedly ended up deleting it and offering the same man another 20 euros in a follow-up video, in addition to another $330 to his daughter to prevent a lawsuit. The case was pursued by Barcelona’s hate crimes office as a violation of the moral integrity of the victim.

Gheorge said no one had ever treated him so badly in all the time he had lived on the street.

Ren defended himself in court, saying, “I do things to mount a show: People like what is morbid.” Judge Rosa Aragonés said that “This was not an isolated act.” She went on to describe the video as a “clear and unambiguous act of humiliating content.”