Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast
Youtuber Is Now In Prison For a Prank - The Goodnight Chicken story
24 Feb 2025
Taiwanese YouTuber Chen Neng-chuan, known online as "Goodnight Chicken," and fellow streamer Lu Tsu-hsien staged a fake kidnapping in Cambodia to attract online attention. They live-streamed fabricated abduction scenes in Sihanoukville, a city notorious for actual kidnapping and scam operations, falsely portraying themselves as victims. Their actions led to their arrest by Cambodian authorities, who charged them with incitement to disrupt social order. Both were sentenced to two years in prison.
Full Episode
So this YouTuber is about to spend the next few years in prison for pulling a dumbass prank. Now he goes by the name Goodnight Chicken, and he's 31, he lives in Taiwan, and his whole thing is he likes to go to abandoned haunted places and hunt ghosts. And he'll like live stream the whole thing. And one night in 2020, he's out exploring an old sketchy abandoned hospital.
And this is actually a picture of it. Now, this hospital is just another dark, creepy place that he's trying to make a video about. And so he's there and he's walking around live streaming. And that is when Chicken starts to smell something pretty awful. And he just keeps going. And eventually, boom, he sees it. A body hanging there.
And Chicken is of course freaked out, and so he calls the police. And pretty quickly they come and they check it out. And it turns out that this body he found is the body of a local guy who had been missing for over a year. Like his family had been looking for him and stuff.
And so Goodnight Chicken's attempt to make a video in this location actually ends up bringing much needed closure to the guy's family. And soon enough, this story makes the news. And suddenly everyone there in the area is talking about it. And Chicken and his social media starts getting all kinds of attention. And he starts blowing up. And from there, Chicken keeps making these videos.
And people keep watching them and his audience grows bigger and bigger. Over 100,000 followers on YouTube. Almost 300,000 followers on Facebook. And so naturally, he's like, oh snap, I gotta keep doing this. And over the next few years, he's going to all kinds of creepy abandoned buildings and all kinds of places to film. And his audience loves it, and they love him. But then, it all goes wrong.
Because Goodnight Chicken isn't quite content with how big his audience is. He wants more. And in 2024, he gets an idea. What if he went to one of these abandoned places and he got kidnapped during a live stream? I mean, people would freak out and they would start looking for him. Everyone would be talking about it. His name would be all over the news again. He would get so many new followers.
Now, of course, the odds of him actually getting kidnapped aren't very high. So he decides that he's going to have to fake it. Now, this is actually a pretty big scam, and he can't fake a kidnapping alone. So he hits up this other influencer, this guy, Lou. And I imagine Chicken is like, hey bro, you want to help me fake my own kidnapping? And Lou is like... Alright.
And then they decide that the perfect place to do all this is in Cambodia. So Goodnight Chicken gets on his livestream and he tells his audience that he's about to go to Cambodia to explore a dangerous place where foreigners are known to get kidnapped. He's setting up their expectations. Then he and Lou fly from Taiwan down over to Cambodia.
And they buy a bunch of props to pull this thing off, like military uniforms, fake pew-pews, fake blood. I mean, they're going all out. Then later that night, the guys are ready to set this plan in motion. And so Chicken and Lou, they go to this shady place. And there he goes live and he tells his audience that he broke into the place, which I suppose he actually did.
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