Saudi teen arrested for 'unethical behavior' simply because he video chatted with an American girl

A teenager known as Abu Sin is in custody for allegedly engaging in ‘unethical behaviour’ in live-streaming videos with California personality Christina Crockett







A male Saudi Arabian teenager has been arrested in Riyadh over a series of online videos of conversations between him and a female Californian streaming-video star that went viral.







A Riyadh police spokesperson, Colonel Fawaz Al-Mayman, said the teenager, known online as Abu Sin, was arrested on Sunday for engaging in “unethical behaviour” in videos with Christina Crockett, a popular broadcaster on the conversational live-streaming site YouNow. Abu Sin’s real name is not known.







“His videos received many comments and many of the commenters of the general public demanded for him to be punished for his actions,” Al-Maymann added, according to the Saudi Gazette.







The two amassed thousands of fans on the YouNow network, and later on YouTube after videos of the two speaking were uploaded there. The videos featured Abu Sin – a nickname given to him for his broken teeth – and Crockett communicating despite their significant language barriers.







The popularity of the videos of the two of them surprised Crockett, she told the Guardian in an interview. As a broadcaster on YouNow, she can invite her fans to join her broadcasts on split-screen, which is known as “guesting”.







“I guested this kid – I don’t know what he’s saying because I don’t speak Arabic, [but] everyone thought he was really funny, and everyone liked him, and I guess this video went viral,” she said.







“He didn’t speak much English, so I was trying to get him to understand what I was saying most of the time; it wasn’t that good communication,” Crockett said. “He was dancing and being funny, we would both dance on there because we can’t communicate with words. It was pretty funny.”







The two were not in a relationship – Crockett points out in one recent video that she has a boyfriend – but their unlikely interactions captured the imaginations of thousands of viewers.