Social media wannabes are posing as supermarket employees and accusing customers of theft in a disturbing new online trend.
Videos posted to TikTok and Instagram show the ‘pranksters’ wearing staff uniforms and pretending to work in stores, demanding to check customers’ handbags and patting them down.
In other posts, they tell customers stock is out of date, turn them away at the doors saying the store is closed, and eat shoppers’ food from the checkout conveyor belt.
The fake employee trend comes as part of a “worrying rise” in teenagers and young adults causing havoc in stores for social media fame, supermarket security firm Kingdom Security has warned.
In other videos, youths film themselves damaging and throwing stock across aisles and at staff, as well as riding scooters and skateboards into stores, causing “disruption and panic”.
Another ‘prank’, known as ‘gallon smashing’ in the US, has also resurfaced and is gaining traction in the UK. Troublemakers will walk into a store, grab litres of milk, and smash them on the ground while pretending to fall. It was a popular trend on YouTube in the US in the early 2010s, but appears to have been revived for the TikTok generation.
“It’s about the shock factor and provoking reactions,” said Kingdom Security retail account director Kevin Burton. “It’s a frightening thing for anyone to see or experience.”
Another attention-hungry poster has found fame by hiding in the toilets of a supermarket until after closing time, then coming out and filming himself in the store sneaking up on night staff who are replenishing stock.
In hopes of tackling the problem, Burton said: “We’re trying to keep ahead of the trends, so if we see a new one emerging online, we share it with our network of security guards and give them training on how to deal with it.”
TikTok has since deleted all of the supermarket prank videos shared by The Grocer. It said its community guidelines did not allow for content that promoted or provided instructions on how to commit criminal activities that may harm people or property.
Between January and March this year, TikTok said it had proactively removed 96.6% of content that violated its violence and criminal behaviour policies.
Instagram has been approached for comment.
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