A ghoulish TikToker who duped police to covertly film the body of Nicola Bulley being recovered from the River Wyre has been unmasked and strongly criticised by viewers who use the platform. Curtis Arnold filmed an eight-minute clip of police officers by the water's edge and posted the grim footage on several social media channels.
The 34-year-old barber, who contributed to a social media frenzy that saw users flock to St Michael’s on Wyre in search of the mum-of-two, later admitted to earning close to £1,000 in royalties for the posts after its near million views.
He also posted footage of an ashen-faced couple in shock after finding the mortgage advisor's body in reeds by the river last Sunday (February 19). Arnold previously filmed a 'possible burial site' in woodland near where Nicola was last seen on January 27 and headlined a string of videos with outrageous smears against her partner Paul Ansell.
On his 'Curtis Media' channels on TikTok, YouTube and Facebook, Arnold claims to offer "media and journalism done differently". But he hides his identity, is careful not to appear on camera and sometimes uses a picture of Mr Ansell as his profile image, The Mirror reports.
The athletically-built powerlifter made five, six-hour round trips from his Worcestershire home to St Michael's on Wyre in the space of ten days to acquire "content" for his channels. Arnold's most sickening video from the village opens with his Go Pro camera fastened in a harness around his neck, filming a male police officer blocking his path, reports Lancs Live.
He is asked to turn back but dupes the officer into letting him through by claiming that he needs to return to his parked car and saying that he is from Blackpool. As dozens of officers gather and a police helicopter and drone hover overhead, Arnold asks a female colleague on the other side of the cordon: "What's going on down there? I've walked down and he wouldn't let me pass."
She also directs him to leave the area but the video then cuts to Arnold filming covertly as officers lift what appears to be an orange body bag. Many viewers reacted with horror to his footage headlined 'Nicola Bulley Breaking Police found something . !!!'
One wrote: "This is disgraceful! Imagine if that was your loved one. I hope her family do not see this." Another said: "You need your head looking at filming this. Her children will see this one day you vile man."
Arnold's TikTok account 'Nicola Bulley Case', which had over 13,000 followers and 100,000 'likes', has since been removed. He was tracked down to his barber's shop from his digital footprint after re-branding his channels 'Curtis Media'.
Asked if he was behind the notorious video, he replied: "Yes. How did you find me?" He admitted that he lied to police and crouched in a field to film covertly on his Samsung S21 smartphone. He recalled: "I held the phone as high above me as I could, resting it on fencing. I couldn't see a thing but I knew my camera would be recording whatever was happening.
"It wasn't until I got back to where the mainstream media were gathered that I realised what was on the footage." He gleefully revealed the £716.06 in royalties that he made from YouTube alone, adding: "It is probably £900 by now but it takes a while to come through.
"My ambition is to be a full-time YouTuber and make a good living from it. The income potential is there and I love doing what I am doing on the channel." Arnold is single and lives in a three-bedroom detached house near the barber shop, which he has been running for the past two years. His first viral videos were of 'car fishing' - vehicles coming unstuck attempting to drive through deep water - at Rufford ford near Newark, Nottinghamshire.
The ancient river crossing that featured in the Domesday Book, had been used in various forms for at least 1,000 years. But Nottinghamshire County Council had to close the ford in December at the request of police after the TikTok craze turned the small rural lane into one of the world's most notorious roads.
Someone who knows Arnold well said: "He was not making any money initially and was desperate to monetise his car fishing 'fail' videos. He will do anything for more views to make money. "He gives all TikTok-ers a bad reputation. He is not reporting news...What he is doing is monetising people's peril or anything else he can. This all needs regulating properly. It's like the Wild West."
Arnold tried to justify smearing the reputation of Nicola's grief-stricken partner Mr Ansell, saying: "I felt he was hiding something when I watched him being interviewed on TV. I was hoping my videos would trigger a member of the public to come forward with new information."
Another of his videos, 'Nicola Bulley UNSEEN ABANDONED HOUSE SEARCH!!', has been viewed almost 100,000 times on YouTube.
It shows Arnold roaming around a large, supposedly vacant house on the opposite side of the river from the bench where Nicola was last seen and her phone was found. He has also been criticised for a video he uploaded to another of his channels, 'Curtis Cool Stuff', on February 18 of a "possible burial site".
He filmed a man digging in a copse and it looked like the pair were working in tandem as a search team. But Arnold said he had simply stumbled across another amateur sleuth, saying: " I never met him before. I just filmed him digging."
Arnold claims that his covert filming triggered death threats. He said: "I know that has caused a lot of controversy and if it has caused her family any distress, I apologise. If they saw it, it can't have been a nice thing for them to have seen and I'm sorry about that."
But he remains undeterred: "I intend to follow as many breaking news stories as I can in the future and put them on the channel. It gives the public a chance to get closer to the event and in the Nicola case I wanted people to watch my footage and see if they noticed that me or the police had missed anything."
Experts say that social media algorithms encourage and reward controversial content like Arnold's. There have been 400 million views on TikTok alone of videos with the hashtag 'NicolaBulley'. They include over half a million views of 26-year-old 'psychic' Lucy Hesford-Buckingham, from Wales, sharing her vision on the case before Nicola's body was found.
In her video, she claimed that she sensed intuitively from an 'overwhelming smell of lemon bleach' that Nicola was still alive but being held captive and in 'severe danger'. So many sleuths descended on St Michael's on Wyre that, at one point, police had to issue a 48-hour dispersal order to clear the village of outsiders.
TikTok insists that it removes content and accounts that engage in bullying and harassment or otherwise violates its policies.
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