Is a video showing a Somali man in court asking to be deported instead of having to serve a 30-year prison sentence for daycare fraud real? No, that's not true: The short clip was created by an artificial intelligence tool, according to an AI-generated content detector. The account that first posted the video is filled with similar AI slop and it offered no evidence that it was real.
The video (archived here) originated on the @Judged4life YouTube channel where it was published on January 21, 2026, under the title "Somalian gets massive sentence for fraud! #sentence #prison". The transcript read:
Judge: For committing fraud on a massive scale and using daycares as your cover up, this court sentences you to 30 years in state prison.
Defendant: Can you just deport me? Please?
Judge: Absolutely not. You'll do your full sentence here and will be deported afterwards.
This is what the first frame of the video looked like at the time of writing:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of X.com)
The YouTube Shorts video had been viewed 2.5 million times at the time of writing. Other social media accounts copied and posted it, including an X post (archived here).
AI-generated videos of shocking court incidents are common across social media platforms and this one was not hard to spot as fake. The woman -- apparently a defense lawyer -- sitting next to the defendant never moves, not even looking at her client when he makes his plea to avoid prison. The YouTube channel first sharing the video is another clue. It does not have a disclaimer acknowledging the videos are AI-made, but a review of all of the videos on the page shows they are obvious fakes.
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of YouTube)
Lead Stories uploaded the video to the Hive Moderation AI-generated content detection tool, which returned a decisive verdict. It scored that it was 99.4% likely to be AI-generated content.
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of hivemoderation.com)
If the video was real, then it would have been recorded by a media outlet's camera. News organizations would have certainly posted the remarkable clip on their websites. But a reverse image search (archived here) using Google Lens found no matches for a frame of the video.
