A group of 10 young men were fined yesterday for staging a mass shooting prank in Bangkok’s Nong Chok neighborhood in a deeply stupid bid for social media fame.
The men, aged 18 to 27, were charged with creating a nuisance and inciting fear after they drove by bus stops along Suwinthawong Road and pretended to shoot bystanders with fake guns while dressed in camouflage.
The group also played sounds of gunfire over a loudspeaker to mimic a mass shooting.
“We’d like to mess around in Nong Chok. We wanna see people run for their lives,” says one of the men in the video.
The video was posted Friday to their Facebook page “Grean the Gang,” and has been viewed nearly 800,000 times.
All of the men were arrested on Sunday in the neighborhood near Lampa Ong Temple. They admitted to filming the video but said that the whole thing was staged — claiming that some of them pretended to be bystanders at the bus stops and ran on cue, reported Daily News.
Given that it was happening in very public settings, it seems unlikely no one was shaken up, and in at least one sequence you can see women who appear to be genuinely spooked.
After posting the video, they said their Facebook page likes increased from 400 to 4,700.
In local media reports, only the Facebook page admin — 27-year-old Nattapong Thongdee — was identified.
The men pleaded guilty yesterday and were fined THB5,000 (about US$150) each. Police also seized their fake weapons: a toy handgun and an actual caulking gun.
On their Facebook page, the group issued a public apology, saying they only wanted Thai people to have a laugh.
“We’d like to apologize if we’ve brought negavity to the society, as some of you didn’t know the video was staged. We are confident that we did not disturb anyone [in filming the video],” they wrote on Friday.
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