In May 2019 Kanghua Ren — known to his followers as ReSet —
was ordered to pay his victim more than $20,000 and shut down his YouTube and other social media channels for five years after he filled Oreo cookies with toothpaste and gave them to a homeless man, filming and posting video of the man vomiting afterward. He was also sentenced to 15 months in prison, a term likely to be suspended because Ren is a first-time offender convicted of a non-violent crime, according to
The New York Times. The YouTube celebrity claimed the challenge was a harmless prank proposed by one of his 1.2 million followers. 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. At trial where the charge was pursued by the hate crimes prosecutor’s office, Ren said he often accepted “challenges” from his YouTube followers and carried them out “in a joke,” reports the newspaper
El País. “I do things to give a show
, people like morbid things,” he said during the trial, according to the outlet. In handing the package of cookies to the man, Ren, who was then 19, also gave the man a 20 euro bill. After uploading his video, Ren wrote: “Look at the positive side: this will help you clean your teeth, I think you have not cleaned them since you became poor,” according to
El País.