Monday, October 6, 2025 - French Influencer Amine Mojito, whose real name is Ilan M., has been sentenced to jail after his syringe prank videos sparked outrage and fear in France.
The Paris Criminal Court made the ruling
on Friday, October 3, and sentenced the 27-year-old to 12 months in
prison, of which six months shall be served in custody, and the rest
suspended.
Mojito was also fined €1,500 ($1,761) and prohibited
from possessing or carrying a gun for three years.
The prankster went viral when he posted videos where he
injected bystanders with an empty syringe on Parisian streets.
The video went viral just days before the country’s Fête de
la Musique (World Music Day) in June, when France was on edge due to
unfounded rumors of attacks involving needles at festivals and student
parties.
The court in France convicted Mojito of “violence with a
weapon not resulting in work incapacity.”
Prosecutors initially demanded a more severe sentence, 15
months in electronic monitoring for five years, claiming that the jokes
knowingly aggravated public outrage in an otherwise volatile context.
One prosecutor described Mojito as a “public menace,”
stressing that even though the syringes were empty, the fear they incited was
real. Several victims testified to experiencing genuine panic, with one
likening the experience to a nightmare given ongoing public health
anxieties.
Mojito, though, defended himself by claiming the videos were
never intended to do any damage.
“I had had the very bad idea of performing these tricks
doing mimicry of what I had seen on the internet, in Spain [and] in Portugal,”
he told the court, as published in Libération. “I didn’t think it could
hurt people. That was my mistake, I didn’t think of others, I thought of
myself.”
He went on to detail that the stunt was designed to revive
his internet career and to market a physical exercise program, after having
experienced, in his own words, a brief period of being an influencer in teen
life.
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