Sam Pepper

by VICTORIA MALDONADO

Staff Writer

Sam Pepper is a well known, but very controversial, YouTube vlogger mostly known for his pranks. In 2012 he made videos that made us feel happy and hopeful. One of his videos was a prank. He dressed similarly to a police officer and went around town sticking envelopes onto people’s windshield wipers. As the car’s owners would approach, he would walk away and try to avoid a conversation as best he as could. After the video showed the people opening the envelopes, and instead of finding a ticket they found some money and a short letter wishing them the best. In another video he had tried to do something different. Many people look down on the homeless and assume they are where they are due to mistakes. He sat down one day and asked a random man to tell him his story, and he opened many people’s eyes because of this video. However, in the past few years people’s opinions of him have changed. He has been said to have sexually assaulted multiple women in several of his more recent prank videos. Another video that has earned a bit of attention is a prank video where he pretends to kidnap a young boy, takes him and his best friend to the top of a building and executes the boy’s best friend in front of his very eyes. Due to these videos, Sam has gotten a lot of hateful comments and messages. After noticing how many people wanted him off of YouTube, even forming petitions to get him off, he announce he would take off his videos after earning $1.5 million. This was announced in December 2015. On February 21, 2016 he  posted on Twitter a post saying “I give up”. By the end of that day all of his videos were set to private, his account no longer able to be found, and all of his tweets are deleted.