- There’s a point where a prank stops being a prank, and this guy passed it long ago.
A small, good-natured prank between friends usually does no harm – in fact, it can build friendships. But once you start involving complete strangers, there’s a real chance you go too far.
This young Polish man, though, went even further beyond that point.
A 23-year-old pizza prankster from Poland is facing several years in prison. He repeatedly ordered pizzas to strangers’ homes.
It might be more fitting to call him a pizza terrorist, though. He would often place inordinately large orders, which resulted in significant financial losses to the restaurants.
He would also include creepy delivery notes addressed to his victims, threatening them or their families with various disturbing acts.
After an extended period of harassment, Poland’s cybercrime police got on the man’s trail and recently arrested him. He now faces charges of serious crimes, which could put him behind bars for years.
Hundreds of Bogus Orders
Poland’s authorities have not disclosed how long the 23-year-old had been harassing restaurants and innocent strangers. However, as he reportedly placed orders for hundreds of meals, he must’ve been active for some time.
On paper, his prank seems innocent enough. He would order a pizza under someone else’s name, say he’d pay on delivery, and then give the restaurant the victim’s address.
It’s an underhanded prank, but if you pull it off on a friend once, it’s probably fine. However, the man wasn’t targeting his friends and family.
According to a statement from Poland’s Central Bureau for Combating Cybercrime (CBZC), he would typically impersonate well-known politicians or media personalities while placing the order. Even more concerningly, sometimes he’d use the names of seemingly random people.
Most of his orders used addresses around the northwestern Polish city of Szczecin. Yet he also made more than a dozen fake pizza orders targeting the country’s large cities, such as Krakow, Wroclaw, and Warsaw.
The man wouldn’t order just a single pizza, either. The authorities stated that his orders were often ridiculously large, which caused serious financial losses to the unsuspecting restaurants.
“One restaurant order exceeded PLN 37,000 ($10,000),” the CBZC said.
His habit of making huge orders was occasionally a silver lining, though. Many restaurants rejected his most outrageous orders as impossible to fulfill.
One pizzeria reportedly voided an online order for 300 pies, stating that it couldn’t bake so many pizzas in a reasonable time. In such cases, the intended recipients reportedly stayed blissfully ignorant of the prank.
Disturbing Threats
Causing losses to local restaurants was one thing, but our pizza terrorist wasn’t satisfied with that. He would also typically ask his chosen restaurant to include a delivery note for the recipient.
Those notes did not say nice things.
On the milder but no less disturbing end of the scale, the man would spell out intimate details about his victims’ lives that complete strangers shouldn’t know. He supposedly acquired the information through extensive online (and hopefully only online) stalking.
“The order notes often contained information known only to the recipients or their closest relatives, which caused the victims to feel distressed and violated their privacy,” the CBZC noted.
But wait, it gets worse. On top of demonstrating that he knew who his victims were and where they lived, the man would also threaten to harm his victims in some way.
“Threats included kidnapping a minor, setting a notary’s office on fire, and causing a traffic accident,” said the CBZC.
Joint Cybercrime Operation
The CBZC didn’t detail how it got on the pizza prankster’s name. Perhaps the secrecy is warranted to avoid spawning copycats who would then be able to skirt the police’s attention.
All the CBZC said was that catching the man required a joint operation between the cybercrime agency and the Szczecin police department. They arrested the man at his home already two months ago, and he has remained in preventive custody since then.
During the arrest, they also confiscated “devices and data carriers” the man had used to place the fake orders. His motive for the strange harassment scheme hasn’t been established.
Now, the man faces a long list of serious charges, according to Euronews, including stalking, identity fraud, harassment, and financial fraud. He’s looking at a maximum sentence of eight years in prison.
For more stories about notorious practical jokes, read our list of 8 of history’s strangest and most outrageous public pranks.