Sam Pepper: YouTuber claims his entire online persona is fake in video after deleting everything bar one tweet

The controversial vlogger urged fans to give him a second chance

Sam Pepper introduces his controversial video "How to make out with strangers" (YouTube/Screenshot)

YouTuber Sam Pepper has released a video days after deleting all of his content claiming his controversial pranks were staged and his “online persona” is fake.

The vlogger deleted all but one Tweet on his Twitter page and made his YouTube content private on Sunday.

In a video on Wednesday, he said the videos were made private because they do not reflect who he really is, and only those that truly represent him would be republished.

Pepper has faced a petition calling for the deactivation of his YouTube channel over controversial pranks such as “Fake Hand Ass Pinch”, “How to make out with strangers”, and “Killing best friend prank”, which involved kidnapping another vlogger and pretending to execute their friend as they watched. The petition was signed by over 220,000 people.

Pepper, who has over two million YouTube subscribers and one million Twitter followers, said he wanted to be “completely honest” with fans in a 20-minute video released overnight where he begged for a “second chance”.

The 26-year-old said he reached a point where YouTube was his “life” before deleting his video and social media accounts. Pepper said he wanted to be “100 per cent myself” for the first time in a video, “because that’s not what I’ve been”.

He claimed his controversial pranks were fake and filmed with the consent of everyone involved.

“I'm not telling you this for any sympathy or whatever, I'm in this situation because of me. I just want to tell you everything, honestly, no BS. Whatever happens from here on doesn’t matter. I was one of the first pranksters, prank channels or whatever then all these other prank channels started coming out and they would be doing more and more and more crazy stuff. Because I come from doing pranks, I would be like, ‘there’s no way you could be doing that’. That’s when I worked out, even back to TV when I was a kid, all this stuff is fake, like we believe it all but it's really fake. All it was about was the end goal.

“I started making fake videos and I’d upload them. Some were good, some were like whatever. Then this whole picking up girls phase came along and I was like, ‘ok, I can do that, I can make videos doing that.’ What I wasn’t thinking this whole time was, ‘if I have to fake a video, that means that it’s too crazy for me to actually do for real'.

Pepper said he first made himself look like a “massive douche” with the Fake Hand Ass Pinch prank where he used a fake arm to grope women on the street, which he insists was staged and filmed with the consent of all of the girls involved.

“Of course, I know in real life that I can’t do that, that’s why I faked it and I asked everyone before I did it,“ he said.

“I’ve been faking my whole online persona.

”I was stupid. Instead of me thinking to myself like do I want my image to be portrayed this way? I thought 'this is what everyone else is doing, this is what's going to make me money, this is what's going to get me view. Stupid like douchebag mentality. I fell into that trend and that's what led me on to the ass pinch prank.”

He said the fake kidnap video was made in the hope that it would go viral and revive his channel after his views began to decline. “Instead of thinking then, 'ok, if people aren't going to like it, why would I put that out there? If people are going to be even the smallest bit mad at me, why I would I want people thinking about that of me?'. That's not who I am.' I put the video up and I got a huge backlash again. Because I'm putting forward the wrong image of myself; I'm putting forward a character that I have created who doesn't give a f**k.

“I'm ashamed of what I have been doing and I want to start again.”