How to film a fake crypto wallet screen prank

First, the line you don’t cross

A prank ends in a reveal, on camera, and nobody is out of pocket. The moment a wallet screen is used to get someone to hand over money or goods, to lend, invest or sell, or to believe they’ve been paid, it stops being a prank and becomes fraud, whichever tool drew the screen. So leave out any setup where you “pay” someone with it, even one you mean to reveal later: a screen showing money arriving is exactly how fake-payment scams work. Our acceptable use policy covers the rest.

Choose who you prank with the same care. The pranks below make you look foolish, not rich, and the person watching is let in on the joke within the same take. Someone who might act on what they see before you reveal it — move money, call a bank, lend you something — is the wrong audience.

Why a screenshot ruins it

A picture of a wallet lasts until someone touches it. Your friend reaches for the phone, swipes, and nothing moves — the prank is over, and not the way you planned. The joke in a wallet prank is a number that changes, so you need a wallet that changes: one that opens from the home screen, answers a tap and moves its own balance. The app vs screenshot comparison goes through the difference in full.

Set up the wallet

1. Open Pozer’s crypto wallet in the editor and name the app. That name goes under the icon on your home screen; the Wallet name inside the app is Main Vault until you change it. Pozer doesn’t supply app icons, and putting a real wallet’s name or logo on yours is against our policy.
2. Decide who moves the numbers. With Live prices on, the default, the total follows the market. With it off, nothing moves unless someone taps it, or an alert you switched on lands.
3. Build the wallet around the prank. A prank about losing everything needs one large row to lose, and the default 24.8 ETH at the top of the list is exactly that.
4. Publish with Create home-screen app, open the link on the phone you’ll film with, and add it to the home screen: Share, then Add to Home Screen in Safari on iPhone; Install app in Chrome’s ⋮ menu on Android.
5. Open it from the home screen rather than a browser tab, and turn on Do Not Disturb. The first time it opens that way, your Edit button shows once with a hint and then hides, so it stays out of the take.

How the reveal plays

A wallet prank happens in four beats, and each has something on screen worth holding the camera on.

1. The fan-out

Tap the + at the bottom right. The screen behind goes dark and soft, Send, Receive, Add Cash and Trade stack up the right edge with a round button beside each, and the + turns into a cross. It takes a second, and it’s the moment the person watching realises something is about to happen.

2. The keypad

Tap Send and a sheet slides up: the amount in large type, a chip for each token, a To (optional) line and a keypad. From the + it starts on the first token in your list; from a token’s own page it starts on that token. Either way the lit chip is the one that moves, so check it, then type the amount. It counts in the token, so it reads 24.8 ETH rather than a dollar figure. Leave To blank and the receipt and the history print the same made-up address; type one yourself, in the same short form, like 0x8b77…1fa0, if the scene needs a particular one.

The keypad takes two decimal places, but a send is capped at what the row holds. To empty 0.412 BTC, type anything larger, such as 0.42, and the receipt headlines what actually went: 0.412 BTC.

3. The receipt

Tap Send. A tick draws itself, SENT appears in the accent colour over −24.8 ETH and roughly what it was worth, and the receipt lists the asset, the address, the rate, a network fee, a reference, and the date and time. On the free tier, the SIMULATED · POZER.COM mark sits between the amount and those details. The receipt stays until someone taps Done or the dimmed screen above it. It never times out mid-shot, so hold on it for as long as the reaction needs.

4. The aftermath

Tap Done and the home screen has already changed: the ETH card reads 0 ETH and $0.00, and the total is lower by whatever that ETH was worth. The send is in the history too — on Ethereum’s own page and under Settings, History — marked Just now.

The camera can follow your friend onto that page as well: it keeps Ethereum’s price and market cap, and only Your Positions has dropped to 0 ETH.

Two pranks that use it

The wrong address

You’re the victim. Talk your friend through a send you’re about to make, type an address, and send the whole ETH row. Then look at the address again, slowly, and let the realisation land. Your friend sees what you see: SENT, −24.8 ETH, an empty row. Let the reveal land before the take ends; the tidiest one is to reset the app in front of them and watch the ETH come back (see between takes, below).

The dare

Someone dares you to put your stablecoins into a meme coin — or to let them pick the coin with their eyes shut from the Trending Tokens list on Explore. Tap +, then Trade. The sheet has a From row and a To row of chips; pick USDC in From and the chosen coin in To (whatever you picked in From greys out in To), type 5420 — the keypad shows it as 5,420 — and tap Swap. The receipt reads SWAPPED, −5,420 USDC, with roughly how much of the new coin it bought, the rate and a 0.30% spread. On the home screen the USDC card empties and the other one grows, while the total barely moves: a swap keeps its value, less the spread.

There’s an encore if they demand you undo it. Swap back and the spread comes off a second time, so you end with a little less USDC than you started with. The joke is their face at each receipt; the reveal is that none of it was ever money.

Between takes

• The prank stays put. What you do in the app is saved on that phone, so the empty row is still empty after you close and reopen it, and the next take would start from the wreckage. It lasts until you reset it, or until you publish a change, which replaces it once the phone has loaded the new version.
• Reset it. In the installed app your Edit button stays hidden; hold two fingers still on the screen for a moment and it appears for a few seconds. It opens your app’s settings, where Reset to published values puts every figure back to what you published. Done in front of your friend, it makes a tidy reveal.
• Change the setup from the phone. The same panel has every field from the editor, opened on your published values rather than the take’s, so you can swap in a different coin or holding and tap Save changes. Saving publishes it: that becomes the new starting point, and the take is cleared.
• Expect the market to move. With live prices on, the total at the start of take two won’t quite match take one. In a prank that’s realism; if you’re cutting takes together, keeping a crypto balance consistent on camera covers it.

What your friend might tap

Friends grab phones, so it helps to know what they’ll find. The Home, Trade and Explore pills switch tabs, and the search pill opens Explore. Every token opens its own page, whose chart redraws for each range, and on that page the coin at the top left goes back. A few things are only set dressing and do nothing when pressed: the heart and share buttons on a token’s page, every Settings row except History, and Lock wallet. None of them will spoil the take. And on your own phone, a single finger never brings up your Edit button, however long it rests on the glass; that takes two fingers held still.