Fake Chipotle Worker Arrested on 6 Felony Charges

You know that weird feeling when you're scrolling through reels on Instagram or TikTok on your phone and you come across prank videos that are so anti-social that you wonder whether it's actually crossed the line into just being out and out illegal. I mean sure they're making funny content but they are actually doing what they're filming themselves to be doing. Either pulling fire alarms in a crowded store, pretending to rob people who are walking by, and even going into business establishments and pretending to work there in order to get access to restricted areas. It's interesting content but it raises the question does recording something suddenly make doing it not illegal? And the answer is no it doesn't. Case in point you had a social media prankster who got millions of video views by invading businesses pretending to be an employee and he has just pled guilty to criminal impersonation. Heston James Cobb who posts online under the name Heston James appeared in Maricopa County Superior Court two weeks ago on August 28th. Now he was originally facing up to nine years in prison for 13 different counts including things like third degree burglary, criminal trespass, and disorderly conduct. However he reached a plea deal with the prosecutors. The prosecutors agreed to drop 10 of the charges if he pled guilty to three. Mr Cobb agreed to do so as well as to pay restitution, to remove the videos from his channels which have cumulatively gotten tens of millions of views, as well as to avoid any contact with the victims. Now for your reference whether you're recording it on your phone for content or not the state of Arizona pretending to be an employee in order to gain unauthorized access to a property is a class six felony. That's two years in prison plus a fine of $150,000 for each one of the three counts that he pled guilty to. A judge will now sentence Mr Cobb on August 1st and give him his actual sentence. And you had a criminal defense attorney named Serena Townsend. She is unrelated to the case but she was giving her opinion on it and she told Law and Crime Network that she doesn't expect leniency in this particular case. Take a listen. It does sound like you know they really feel the need to crack down make an example just to stop this from happening over and over and over again. Maybe if it happens one time they don't go full force but it does look like they're fed up at this point. So this point you might be wondering what exactly did Mr Cobb do to land himself in such serious trouble? Well I'm going to show you one video of him and his associates entering a car workshop basically a mechanic's studio and getting underneath a raised vehicle under the guise of working there. I'm just going to be bringing in all my guys because you guys have been doing a really slow job. I've been getting multiple complaints. I'm from corporate I told you so I'm well I'm calling my guys and they're going to be working all these cars. They're not? Get to calling them. Oh get to calling them? All right let's see. They are right here. I think this is them right here. Come on come on come on everyone come on get to work get to work everyone. Yo everyone take that tire off take that tire off quick. Everyone check the oil check the oil. It's good it's good it's good. You can just imagine the insurance nightmare with that client if something happened to go wrong with that car. Mr Cobb also did something similar at a Chipotle as well. Him and his associates they claimed that they were there from the head office and they tried to enter parts of the restaurant that were for staff only. They wore Chipotle uniforms and started wiping down tables with one of them even using a mop on a tabletop. Employees repeatedly asked Mr Cobb and his associates to leave and then eventually called the police. Again watching it it's funny content but it's also a good reminder that filming yourself doing something illegal for content purposes does not make it any less illegal which is a point that was made by a local police officer who spoke with the law and crime network. It actually came in as a burglary call so the business thought that they were being robbed by this group coming in so it actually used a lot of police resources to come in. We didn't find Heston at that time but we set up perimeters so a lot of effort went into locating the subject after this incident. Likewise you had Mr Steve Chookery president of the Arizona Restaurant Association so you can imagine he probably does not appreciate these types of pranks and he told the AP the Associated Press that he hopes Mr Cobb's punishment is severe enough to prevent copycats from doing what he did. Quote there's no place for it that's the last thing we need to put up with in the restaurant industry. The amount of money it takes to operate today is expensive. He added that the Arizona Restaurant Association does not offer training or advice for restaurant owners on how to deal with prank pranksters since quote we're a society of civility we shouldn't have to. Now this arrest has actually been a long time coming. Police arrested Mr Cobb and served him with a search warrant at his home back in July of last year and even that was already on the heels of a month-long investigation that they were doing into him. You have body cam footage which captured the search and posted online by EWU on their YouTube page and you can see meta AI glasses that were found in the house along with uniforms bearing the logos of businesses like Chick-fil-a, UPS, Target, Home Depot, Raising Cane's as well as Amazon. However look at this other clip from that very same video it's I guess you can say a different angle on this whole thing. It shows Mr Cobb's journal that was found by police and just two months before that Chipotle incident that ultimately got him in so much trouble Mr Cobb wrote the following in his journal quote I have no other choice but to make this work by any means possible I will give my family the best life due to my hard work I cannot afford to miss a single which I think is a real good glimpse into the incentive structure that young entrepreneurial people suddenly find themselves in. I mean social media it offers both fame and wealth and if you look at the data if you look at the polling data of young people it's clear that being an influencer is the goal of the upcoming generation much more than being something like a doctor or even an astronaut it's about getting those clicks and those precious views however possible which creates kind of a I guess you can call an outrage spiral quote the problem is that for a creator like this this becomes a content format once you see that it works you're going to make more of them and you have to keep upping the ante so you know yesterday's outrageous video becomes today's normal video well then what's tomorrow's video and with the news of Mr Cobb's guilty plea it's interesting to think back on how the prank video format has evolved over the years back in the 1950s you had Alan Funt present the hidden camera show Candid Camera and that was popular for decades the humor it relied on social confusion ending with a reveal and the victim being okay with it and usually giving their consent like this example of puzzle drivers stopping because snails are crossing the road then in the 2000s you had shows like Jackass and Ashton Kutcher's Punked introduce more giant shock value more extreme stunts and celebrities being the targets rather than just ordinary people and even though they seem chaotic on camera when you're watching them you're like wow this is insane those were all studio-backed productions with insurance policies on file clear permissions as well as all the legal waivers signed off on all the t's marked and all the i's dotted even this semi-naked tightrope walk over a crocodile enclosure had all the permissions available to it before it was done then in the 10-year span starting in the year 2005 the rise of YouTube as a platform saw content creators basically bypass traditional network gatekeepers and in those early YouTube days the viral pranks they focused on things like awkward interactions public flash mobs or just jump scares one of the most popular was improv everywhere's frozen grand central station in New York City from the year 2008 gathered a lot of views and was really emblematic of that period of time and it was around that time around 2008 that pranking videos really took off and YouTubers started to make a lot of money on them the pranking couple prank versus prank as well as the I guess you can say legendary French prankster Remy Gillard they both hit over one and a half billion views in fact prank versus pranks real life spider-man swinging around Venice beach was seen by over 40 million people which was a huge number back in that era of YouTube but then like most things after 2016 it began to fly off the rails we saw the rise of short form videos using intense shock content to capture ever decreasing attention spans like this dog in a bag prank that got half a billion views now technically in the year 2019 YouTube banned videos that show either dangerous or emotionally distressing pranks on YouTube's FAQ page they said the following quote YouTube is home to many beloved viral challenges and pranks that said we've always had policies to make sure what's funny doesn't cross the line into also being harmful or dangerous which gives them the official permission to ban certain content creators as well as certain pieces of content but obviously if you've been on the YouTube platform you know that prank videos are alive and well also since 2019 it's not just YouTube the rise of all these other sites give plenty of platforms for pranks to be posted elsewhere but if you're thinking about getting in on the pranking gold rush of videos please just do remember holding a camera and recording yourself doing something illegal does not automatically make whatever you're doing less illegal Mr. Cobb is currently having to find that out the hard way but even he I should mention is lucky there was a case over in Tennessee where a 20 year old content creator was approaching people in a park with a knife as part of a prank robbery video but then as you probably can guess what happened in Tennessee one of his victims pulled out a real gun and shot him in self-defense and so that's all to say be careful out there if you want to read through my research notes you can find them down in the description box below right below those like and subscribe buttons both of which I hope you smash so this video can reach ever more people via the YouTube algorithm hey I don't rely on pranks I rely on decent videos good research as well as you smashing those like and subscribe buttons so my videos reach ever more people so I thank you for that otherwise if I if this doesn't work out I will have to probably resort to some prank videos uh lastly though leave me your thoughts in the comment section what are your thoughts on on these prank videos I know certain countries have gone to the opposite extreme you know communist countries like China where they completely either ban or heavily disincentivize certain types of content or other types of content very famously like their version of TikTok promotes learning videos and science videos and stem videos versus our TikTok which promotes all the everything else basically uh is that a good path forward or is that like too much top-down control because at that point you're the obvious question becomes like if the government can do that well what's stopping the government from suppressing political content as we saw in you know 2020 up until like 2026 up until now uh what would stop them from using that lever of control to just ban viewpoints they don't agree with so it's like it's a balancing act right but I think the answer probably isn't government right it's more of like a social answer like from from the bottom up rather than the top down but what would the answer actually be one thing I I can only think of is uh the rise of good content like one thing that came out of um of all this is the rise of like long-form podcasts where you have a person on and you can explore an idea with them for like three or four hours at a time that's sort of um the antithesis of the short-form content and that grew I believe out of that environment where things were getting shorter the the videos were trying to capture an ever-decreasing attention span but that left an entire market open for more long-form content where you can actually explore ideas and delve deeper and like really think things through with somebody you know in in watching that video and I think that's probably if I had to offer my guess that would be the answer would be more of like a shift in public sentiment and in the open marketplace of of content which is a marketplace in and of itself something will will rise up that will be more interesting than short-form content maybe I mean maybe that's a hope but maybe that's also like it'll be a Pareto distribution like 20% of the people will seek out this better content but 80% of the people will like continue just going going down the pathway of watching prank videos and then thinking that that's the norm so anyway I don't know leave your thoughts in the comments it's obviously um it's obviously the trend and I can only imagine if we do an update to this episode 10 years from now what we'll be describing this period as that we're in right now anyway leave your thoughts in the comment section below if any possible solutions that you can think of uh otherwise though until next time I'm your host Roman from the Epic Times stay informed and most importantly stay free