Have you seen a mysterious video showing a countdown clock purporting to be from Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old “person of interest” in the murder last week of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York? The video went viral on YouTube on Monday and drew attention on sites like Hacker News. But it is completely false.
Mangione allegedly had a “manifesto” as well as a ghost gun and was arrested at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania, on Monday. He was charged with five crimes, including carrying a weapon without a license, forgery, false identification to authorities and possession of criminal instruments, according to a criminal complaint. published online. But Mangione was not charged with Thompson’s murder and has not been named a suspect, despite the Internet treating him as such.
A video surfaced Monday that appeared to be from a YouTube account associated with Mangione. It began with the words “The truth” and “If you see this, I’m already under arrest.” It featured a countdown clock that first counted from 5 to 1 before going to 60 and counting to zero from there.
The bottom right corner included the word “Soon” and briefly displayed the date December 11 before disappearing again in less than a second. He ended with the words “Everything is scheduled, be patient. Goodbye for now.”
If you are curious to know what the video actually looked like, you can check it hereassuming YouTube doesn’t remove this one too. We promise we are not trying to mislead anyone with this. But it can be interesting to see what all the fuss is about after a hoax has gone viral but you missed it.
The account was created in January 2024 and it is entirely possible that someone set up some sort of dead man switch—they schedule a video to be posted at some point in the future, with the intention of stopping it from ally posting if they haven’t been arrested (or killed, or whatever the scenario is). But YouTube confirmed to Gizmodo that it wasn’t real.
“We closed the channel in question for violating our impersonation policies, which prohibit content intended to impersonate another person on YouTube,” a spokesperson for the video platform told Gizmodo via email on Monday.
“The channel’s metadata was updated following widespread reports of Luigi Mangione’s arrest, including updates made to the channel’s name and handle,” the spokesperson continued. “In addition, we terminated 3 other channels owned by the suspect, per our Creator Liability Guidelines.”
The spokesperson also noted that these accounts had been inactive for months. Who is really behind the video? That remains an unknown. But our money is on something related to cryptocurrencies. Who knows?