NEW YORK — A new YouTube video that has been watched 10 million times in two days shows how willing teenage girls are to meet a stranger they have only talked to online.
A 22-year-old man masquerading as a 15-year-old boy named “Jason” adds three girls as friends on Facebook. Within three days, the girls agreed to meet him.
“She said OK I’ll be there in five minutes,” he said, referring to one of the girls.
Coby Persin, a YouTube prankster, came up with the pedophile experiment and enlisted parents’ help on Craigslist. Each thought their child would never go through with the meeting.
“God I hope she doesn’t open that door,” the girl’s mother said. “She won’t do it.”
Mikayla meets her online suitor at a playground, even though he looks nothing like his Facebook picture. Coming out of nowhere, her father, frantic, yells the question every parent is asking: “Mikayla! Are you crazy! Why would you do this?”
Then 12-year-old Juliana invites who she thinks is a boy, to her home. As Persin approaches the home, her father’s anger turn to tears.
“What’s wrong with you?” he said. “You could have been raped or killed. We already lost your mother. What would I do if I lost you?”
But the most terrifying moment comes when a 14-year-old Jenna agrees to meet her unknown new friend in a van.
“Jenna thinks her parents are going out for date night,” Persin said in his video. “She thinks my brother is driving.”
“Do you think she’s going to go through with this?” Persin asked her parents.
“No way. I don’t even believe it’s her,” Jenna’s mother said. “It’s probably one of her friends playing around.”
Her parents, wearing masks, played the role of “abductors” in the experiment.
Jenna gets in the car and starts to scream when she thinks she’s being abducted. Then her parents take off their masks.
“What would have happened if you came out and it wasn’t us back here?” Jenna’s father said. “We look at all these things together. What would you have done?”
