‘Gold Rush’ star Parker Schnabel wasn’t sentenced to life in prison

A rumor that circulated on-line in April and Could 2025 claimed a courtroom sentenced Parker Schnabel, star of the Discovery Channel actuality TV collection “Gold Rush,” to life in jail.

For instance, on Could 4, a TikTok consumer posted two videos displaying a thumbnail picture of a person broadcasting a narrative on Fox Information. The clip featured the caption, “Parker Schnabel From Gold Rush Sentenced To Life Imprisonment.” The movies obtained a mixed whole of greater than 700,000 views. Other users also shared the identical declare on Facebook, TikTok and X.

(@high.review11/TikTok)

Nevertheless, the rumor a few courtroom sentencing Schnabel to a jail sentence was false. Searches of Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google and Yahoo discovered no experiences from information media retailers — together with Fox Information — about this matter. A spokesperson for Discovery Channel has not but responded to a request asking in the event that they wished to remark in regards to the unfaithful declare.

How the Schnabel-prison declare presumably began

In response to the major search engines’ outcomes, the rumor about Schnabel and life imprisonment presumably originated on YouTube. On April 27, a supervisor of the Prime Rewind YouTube channel revealed a video (archived) with the title “Parker Schnabel From Gold Rush Sentenced To Life Imprisonment.” A part of the identical video later appeared within the aforementioned TikTok movies.

The clip — the earliest securely dated one our analysis uncovered — obtained greater than 259,000 views and featured generative artificial-intelligence parts, together with in its scripting and voice narration. The YouTube video displayed an “altered or artificial content material” disclaimer specifying that “sound or visuals have been considerably edited or digitally generated.” The clip didn’t comprise another notices generally discovered with comparable movies, akin to a disclaimer that its content material was fictional. A supervisor for the channel, which didn’t characteristic an electronic mail tackle, has not but responded to a remark asking whether or not they originated the rumor.

The video tells the fictional story of Schnabel going through federal expenses associated to dozens of “willful environmental violations” for mining gold. The AI-generated narrator begins the clip:

Parker Schnabel, the face of “Gold Rush,” the youngest prodigy to ever pull hundreds of thousands from frozen Earth, is not behind the controls of an excavator. He is behind locked doorways. After a crushing verdict in one of the crucial surprising environmental instances in mining historical past, Schnabel’s gold empire has been halted chilly and the sentence handed down, life imprisonment. No parole, no appeals left.

Later within the video, the script — which the AI text-detection web site Copyleaks recognized as probably generated with AI — features a second when the narrator talks of a “twist” involving Schnabel “vanishing from the highlight,” and maybe “negotiating restitution” or being in “protecting custody,” as an alternative of serving his jail sentence. The final line of the narration and script reads, “So, the query is, does Parker come again stronger than ever, or does this chapter mark the tip of a golden run?”

In latest months, YouTube creators additionally promoted false rumors together with “1 MINUTE AGO: Heartbreaking New Particulars About Parker Schnabel,” “Tony Beets And Mike Beets From ‘Gold Rush’ Sentenced To Life Imprisonment” and “‘Pawn Stars’ Rick Harrison Sentenced To Life in Jail, Goodbye Perpetually.”

Such made-up tales — usually that includes inspiring or surprising tales about well-known folks from the worlds of leisure, politics and sports activities — drive social media engagement, probably with the purpose of Fb web page managers or YouTube creators at some point promoting their pages or accounts after incomes excessive follower or subscriber counts. The content material additionally presumably permits for monetization, whether or not by way of the adverts on an internet site or instantly included with YouTube movies.

For additional studying, a earlier reality examine examined the false rumor a few courtroom sentencing Schnabel’s “Gold Rush” costars Mike and Tony Beets to life in prison. One other article additionally investigated a basic rumor claiming Schnabel or one other member of the “Gold Rush” forged stated they said they faked the show.