YouTuber Sells Microwave Meals Through His Fake Restaurant 'The Italian Stallion'
If you've ever ordered delivery and thought that your pizza tasted suspiciously like a microwaved pizza from the grocery store, you might be onto something. At least one YouTuber has been scamming diners by serving them microwaved frozen dinners from his "Italian restaurant," and it's surprising how easy it was for him to (almost) get away with it (via Time).
The YouTuber in question is Josh Pieters, who lives in London. His past videos include all sorts of random things, from hatching a baby quail from a grocery store quail egg to tricking social media influencers into promoting gravel. But the creation of his restaurant took his pranking to extremes.
He tricked the food delivery app Deliveroo into letting him register his fake restaurant, The Italian Stallion, even telling them that he had requested a health inspection, which helped him bypass their usual rule that restaurants need a hygiene rating to sign up.
It's kind of crazy how easy it was. Within three weeks of starting the process his "restaurant" had been added to the app, and all he had to do was wait for the orders to begin.
Once they started, he would run to the Waitrose grocery store below his apartment, then run upstairs and heat the meal up, making the promised deliveries within 15 minutes.
Even weirder? Of the five deliveries he made, two people told Pieters that the food was "great" (via Delish). That's a pretty ringing endorsement for Waitrose's frozen meals, we suppose.
Pieters didn't keep the money he made from his deliveries. He paid all of his customers back after he was done with the stunt.
The prank did make a good point: You should always do your research before ordering from a restaurant on an app. Check online reviews or try to look up a restaurant's location on Google Maps before ordering to make sure it actually exists. Otherwise, you might end up getting scammed too — by someone who isn't going to pay you back after their YouTube video goes viral.