The Jalals' series of bomb and drive-by shooting pranks have achieved precisely what their three young makers set out to do: poke the internet ant nest and ride notoriety to the top. And now it seems they're set to become infamous: following their drive-by shooting prank, posted on February 23, the trio appeared in court on Thursday after being taken into custody by counter-terrorism police. Max (front) and Arman Jalal with their 16-year-old co-accused. Credit:Simon Schluter They are on strict bail conditions preventing them uploading similar videos after being charged with public nuisance, possessing a prohibited weapon and behaving in an offensive manner in a public place. The Jalals' rise to infamy has been dizzyingly swift. In just two months, they have become more famous than any other Australian social media comedians, with almost 2 million Facebook likes and 150 million views of their controversial bomb pranks. If Max and Arman Jalal and their 16-year-old co-accused can stay out of jail, they may well get rich from social media, with an estimated $4500 earning from each short video they post. Companies are offering up to $100,000 for embedded advertising. And they're doing it on the cheap. Their tools: three iPhones, three Arab white thawb robes, three fake Osama-esque beards, and one empty black bag. Their natural mix of good looks, chutzpah, and orchestrated self-promotion don't hurt.

Not bad for three young Muslims of Kurdish descent from Melbourne's northernmost fringes. Max and Arman Jalal with their 16-year-old co-accused (left) Credit:Simon Schluter Brash young men pulling controversial pranks to achieve notoriety is nothing new. Melbourne pranksters and YouTube stars, the Janoskians, infamously posted a skit in 2013 where one of them pretends to masturbate next to a baby. Cue mainstream media storm. But the Jalals' series of bomb pranks was a new form of provocation. Pretending to blow people up? After Paris? Beyond tasteless. The response has been visceral. Americans in their hundreds promised to welcome them with a bullet. Aghast Egyptian women pleaded with them to stop for the sake of all Muslims. Arman Jalal leaving the West Melbourne Police station. Arman and Max Jalal and a 16-year-old co-accused appeared in court Thursday over their prank videos. Credit:Penny Stephens

A Current Affair devoted two full segments to telling them off. In one segment, top Australian counter-terrorism expert Professor Greg Barton called them "young idiots" who hadn't thought about the consequences. "There are more serious things at stake than a cheap laugh here," he said. Older viewers were particularly scathing. On ACA's Facebook page, Marta Kovacs called on the "three morons" to pay attention to the suffering following terrorist attacks. "I'm sure your parents are real proud of you," she wrote. Others agreed. Where were their parents? Why hadn't the police arrested them? Disgusting. A disgrace. Weren't their parents refugees? Were these ISIS training videos? Arman and Max Jalal outside court on Thursday. Their drive-by shooting clip received an even worse response. On The Project, long-time war reporter Stan Grant told them there was nothing funny about terrorism. "What you're doing, it is abhorrent." Even Zaky Mallah – charged and acquitted of terrorism –condemned the shooting prank. "The last prank … with the little girl was uncalled for and may have indeed gone too far," he wrote on his Facebook page. The trick to becoming huge on social media is to be hated and loved in equal measure – so that baby boomers gather to call you cruel, insensitive, or even terrorists on the make, and in turn, your young fans gather in their tens of thousands to mock the haters, to feel a sense of belonging, to rush to your defence.

A screenshot of a prank drive-by shooting video performed by the Jalals. The court heard the man who fled was one of the Jalals, and the girl was a relative. What the Jalals have done is exploit the generation gap and the endless war on terror to get themselves known. Tasteless? Transgressive? Calculating? Without doubt. But you might also ask: is what they do so different to the wogsploitation of Nick Giannopoulos of Wogs Out of Work fame, or The Chaser's breach of APEC security in 2007, with Chas Licciardello dressed as Osama bin Laden? By reclaiming and playing with stereotypes – no. By worsening Western fears of Islamic terrorists? Most likely, yes. I put this to Max Jalal, who, at 20, is the oldest. Aren't these pranks adding fuel to the fire of prejudice? Max shakes his head. "Why would we make fun of our own religion? What we're doing is a mockery of ISIS," he says. "By insulting [ISIS], we're trying to show the world that these guys aren't as scary as the media portrays them." Waleed Aly talks about the real reason begging is illegal. Credit:Channel Ten The bomb pranks, Max says, undercut Islamic State's ability to create fear and animosity. But that sounds like a post-hoc rationalisation: prank first, make your name, and manufacture a vaguely plausible rationale afterwards.

I've arranged to meet the trio at Epping Plaza in Melbourne's northern suburbs, in a bright cafe on a promontory surrounded by acres of cars. They're late – traffic was bad when they picked up the 16-year-old, the youngest, up from school. Max is the most striking, in black jeans and T-shirt. He laps up female compliments on his Instagram selfies. Arman, 18, is dreamier and scruffier. He wears a Jalals T-shirt proudly. The youngest one has the best moustache I've ever seen on a 16-year-old and is eagerly trying on adulthood for size. It's a little hard in a school uniform. They shake my hand in turn and then ceremoniously lay their phones on the table in front of them. The screen of one is cracked. Notifications and messages come as a constant stream. Max swipes his away absently; the other two don't even bother. "We love the death threats," Arman boasts. "Controversy is key." He can say that, of course, because he lives in a nation with few police shootings and little tension over terrorism or crime. The Jalals are biggest in America and Brazil – two countries where these kind of pranks might conceivably lead to an encounter with armed police. The world's collective desire for punishment of what many saw as brattish attention-seeking has been so strong that a fake news story claiming Arman had been shot during a prank went viral in late December. The Jalals – canny marketers if nothing else – promptly mocked up a shot of Arman in a hospital bed and posted it as if it were real. Their fans worked themselves into frenzy.

The Jalals claim to own the fastest growing Facebook page ever. After the first bomb prank, they shot from 20,000 likes to a million in a week. At last, they were big. They'd always known fame would come to them, Arman says. They just didn't know how. All they knew is that it would take the three of them. The three class clowns were popular locally, growing up in the working-class areas of South Morang and Lalor. When Max turned 15, he had their surname tattooed on his forearm in a backyard job; Arman and the boy followed suit. All three took social media seriously, with thousands of friends and followers. In May last year, Max and Arman both ended year-long relationships and returned from their girlfriend-induced isolation. The trio were back together – but they'd lost a year of social media output. "We were out of the scene," Arman says. Max chimes in: "I'd update my status and only get 80 likes. I could feel our profile going down." Says the youngest: "I was getting depressed." Tired of individually chasing the small, potent endorphin shots social media provides, the trio wanted to hit the jackpot.

At night, the three started tossing around ideas. Short internet videos had to be the way. Melbourne's Janoskians – three brothers and two friends – had gone from notorious street pranksters to YouTube stars to being signed by American MTV in 2012. But YouTube was now hugely competitive. As it turned out, the Jalals were in luck. Half a world away, an internet giant was tweaking algorithms in their favour. Early last year, Facebook took aim at Google's seemingly invincible YouTube, encouraging users to directly embed videos on their site and introducing auto-play videos to the news feed. The result: billions of video plays – with no advertising dollars lost to Google. It was the right time to ride Facebook to the top. "We wanted to get in on that," Max says The Jalals' very first attempt at a hit was classic cheapskate Australiana. They'd found a way to hack the shiny new ordering machines at McDonalds and get a half-price family meal. The video went viral in July and got them noticed by Brisbane rapper, Facebook identity and viral talent spotter, 28-year-old Fortafy who is now their manager. Their overnight popularity sent the 16-year-old into a full-blown panic attack. "The day after the Maccas glitch video, I thought I was dead. I thought it wasn't real life," he says, with a nervous laugh. After that, they set up their official web page. A million views is great for your ego, but it won't make you real money. You need to get orders of magnitude bigger – 100 million and up. But how? By chance, they came up with their Arab characters for another middling viral hit playing on body acceptance. In that clip, the trio went from pimpled, sleepy lads to Osama-lookalikes – their first experiment with riffing on the war on terror and the latent Western fear of Muslims.

That gave them the idea to push the envelope and make their now-infamous bomb pranks, posting the first in mid-December. One of their pranks alone has now been seen 85 million times. They filmed the videos on their phones. For each new instalment, they had to go further afield to find people who hadn't seen their earlier work, driving from Williamstown to Doncaster. Victoria was the ideal place to do it. In NSW, there were new police shoot-to-kill policies in place following two small-scale IS-inspired attacks. And as for overseas? Impossible. "There's no way we could have done it in America," Arman says – too many itchy trigger fingers. "That's why [Americans] like it. It's edgier." But their meteoric rise has had real-world consequences, though not quite as the fake shooting story would have it. Ten days before our meeting, Max and Arman drove to a park in the working-class suburb of Broadmeadows, intending to have it out with a teen who allegedly attacked one of their friends. Instead, they claim more than 20 young Muslim men appeared and brutally beat them. One allegedly fired two shots in their direction. Max shows me a healing scar on his arm; Arman the scratches on his face. Glimpsing disbelief on my face, Max grins. Here, he says, giving me his phone. It's a shaky hand-held video taken by one of the alleged attackers. I watch as Arman is repeatedly hit from behind. At one point, an attacker lifts a heavy piece of concrete above his head, but another man stops him from what looks to be a killing blow. The trio obtained a copy through a friend who knew the assailants. And now they're showing me their own brutal beating with no little pride. They survived, reported it to police, and made another video. Everything, it seems, is fair game – fodder for their rise. Their parents, though, were aghast. "They were pretty angry at us for going. They don't want us to lose our lives over a few dollars and likes," Max says. A police spokeswoman said that 16 arrests have been made following the brawl. Charges include possession of a handgun.

Was the beating payback for making Australia's long-suffering Muslims look like extremists? Arman scoffs. "They made [Facebook] statuses saying the Jalals think they can mock their religion and that calls for a straight cave-in," he says, suddenly animated. The 16-year-old jumps in. "They're the potential ISIS members," he says, laughing. Max – the most serious of the three – is unmoved. "It wasn't religion," he says. "They are Muslim but they don't follow it. It was because of our brand. They just want to make a name for themselves." The trio do follow protocols. They claim to have got their prank victims to sign consent forms, as recommended by their lawyers. The angriest was the tradie who leaped into a lake and ruined his phone; they bought him off with a new iPhone, a major upgrade. In their first A Current Affair roast, Max claimed the victims were acquaintances – implying the pranks were faked. But that was just marketing. "We only said that so we didn't look bad to the public," he now admits. After the extreme backlash – not only from haters, but from fans – following the shooting prank which apparently caught out a father and his young daughter, they posted a picture on Facebook of themselves with the girl, who has been showered in lollies and soft toys as an apology.

Last night the story changed again when they appeared on Channel Seven saying the girl was a cousin and that Max had played the apparently angry father. Truth and fiction tend to blur in the Jalals' world. The trio claim they are brothers, but only Max and Arman are brothers. Their parents are Kurds who fled northern Iraq for Pakistan during Saddam's brutal crackdowns before arriving Australia in 1999. Max and Arman have an older brother, but he's not interested in pranks and fame. And though the three are culturally Muslim (no pork), they don't pray. They're calculating chameleons, switching between Arab Muslim stereotypes and their slick Western millennial personas at will. All of this, then, is about scaling up fast, to use a start-up phrase. For Max's 20th birthday, Arman posted a picture of the trio on Facebook. They're in full Osama regalia, with a sword, fake gun and the 'bomb' bag in front of a black Hummer. They're holding a handmade sign: "Happy birthday beautiful. 1,000,000 likes and many more to come." Max has deferred his law degree, and Arman is doing nothing but this. This year, the 16-year-old left school to do this full-time. What, he asks, is the point? To get a degree or a trade and make $50K a year? Social media is where the real money is.

The Jalals have already made two videos with embedded ads – one for a shisha company, one for a hoverboard. When they're big enough, they plan to leave bomb pranks and head towards middlebrow social media popularity. This isn't something creatives often admit, but the Jalals, like many famous social media oversharers, are refreshingly free of self-censorship. There's something disarming about the nakedness of their ambition. They are open in everything, from beatings to self-promotion to their dreams of selling out. Says Max: "Now that we've got a following – we can post anything and it will get big. We've got a negative image at the moment. After this whole controversy, we're going to rebrand. So then bigger brands can hit us up." Like boy bands, though, they need to appear single. "Now that we're bigger, we can't just start conversations with girls," Max says ruefully. "We can't go to parties unless we're all together. Our manager said we have to stay exclusive." The challenge for the trio now is to make sure that their fickle online public stays with them. The Jalals would hardly be the first shock-tactics internet stars to fizzle. Canadian comedian Nicole Arbour's 2015 fat-shaming clip, "Dear Fat People", earned her serious money – but saw brands abandon her.

The Jalals' plan is to periodically stoke controversy with clips like the (staged) kidnapping of a YouTube prankster in front of her boyfriend. Then head mainstream with clever riffs on Western fears or Arab stereotypes. In one of their most recent bomb pranks, one Jalal dresses in black jeans and a T-shirt. He throws a bag and runs. Without the Islamist connotations, their victims simply look baffled. Several try to return the bag. After the shooting prank – but before his arrest – a chastened Max admitted on Today that terrorism wasn't something to joke about anymore. "We're not going to do pranks at that level," he said. After an hour, I can feel that the trio's attention is slipping. Their eyes stray more and more to their phones, where small jolts of excitement – likes, notifications, messages – await. And though someone answers their thousands of fan messages for them, they still like to watch the world's reactions – praise, hate, promises of love or death – roll in. This, it seems, is as good as modern life gets. That night, I watch their live-streaming Facebook video in growing disbelief. Out of costume, the trio trade banter in a sedan parked in a dark suburban street. Later, they'll do a live bomb prank. And 15,000 people are watching. Post your number and we'll call you live, Max says – and in their thousands, their fans oblige. On screen, an endless scroll of numbers from Afghanistan, Australia, Brazil, Philippines, America. Max calls one lucky local fan, but Anna can't speak. "Anna, you need to relax," Max says. "You're live with the Jalals."

But she can't. All we can hear are squeals of omigod-omigod. She's in the presence of newly minted internet royalty. An outlier? Hardly. When the trio travelled to the Gold Coast over summer, a security guard at Melbourne Airport outed himself as a huge fan. You guys are hilarious, he told them. "You know what you should do for your next prank? A bomb prank on a train."