Online and IRL, Oobah Butler has forged a career in taking the piss. There was the time he scammed his way into Paris Fashion Week, making a market stall denim brand the toast of the town. There was ‘The Shed at Dulwich’, a fake restaurant that climbed its way to Trip Advisor’s top spot, serving slap-up ready-meals to south London’s elite. The press attention from those gags was parlayed into its own separate stunt, with Butler sending an army of bottle blonde lookalikes to stand in for him on TV stations around the world. After successfully pulling the wool over eyes across the globe, Butler now has his sights set on one, altogether more menacing opponent: Amazon, Inc.

Taking on the world’s second-largest retailer (you’re next, Walmart) is not for the faint-hearted. But for his new Channel 4 documentary, The Great Amazon Heist, Butler lifts the lid on the company’s many alleged infractions, doing so with his signature dose of absurdity. Who better to buy a stainless steel carpenter knife from a voice-activated Alexa than Butler’s six-year-old niece? Who better to go undercover at a fulfilment centre in a disguise he himself described as “a little bit Mrs Doubtfire”? Butler even goes one step further, collecting bottles of piss that drivers are allegedly forced to urinate in due to long hours, flogging it on their own platform as an energy drink. But behind all the hijinks is a documentary that ultimately gives voice to a dejected workforce, helping to expose the wrongdoings of a company that’s always been hiding in plain sight.

Below, we chat to Butler about why the film isn’t concerned with preaching down to people, the legal battle he’s now a part of, and what he really did with all that piss.

Hi Oobah, congrats on the release of the show. When did you first come up with the idea for the heist?

Oobah Butler: About a couple of years ago. It was a short that I started making with Stan Cross, who edited the show and wrote it with me. I’d read that Oliver Bullough book Moneyland about tax avoidance, and thought it would be really good to make something about tax avoidance that actually would cut through, because it’s such a dry subject. I basically tried to find a version of how to talk about tax avoidance that my mum would care about – a former nurse who works really hard and doesn’t have time to think about international finance. The heist thing, to make it like Ocean’s Eleven, was Stan’s idea.

How much of those years has been taken up by trying to jump through legal loopholes?

Oobah Butler: Oh my god. To go undercover or secret filming is so hard to do. As it should be, because it’s an invasion of privacy. Not even from the perspective of the business, but more just the people that you’re coming into contact with. It’s sort of viewed as a last resort. We felt like – and the lawyers who worked on the project felt like – the only way we could find and confirm certain information would be inside the warehouse. So they signed it off, but it took six months of working on it. This was a really hard film to make, and continues to be now, literally right now. I’m still dealing with legal issues and stuff like that.

“I genuinely don’t know what will happen after it comes out. I mean, I literally commit fraud” – Oobah Butler

How does that feel? Has that had an effect on you?

Oobah Butler: I don’t know yet! Jeremy Vine, who blocked me on Twitter years ago and called me stupid, covered it on his show this morning. That felt good. I was like ‘finally, me and brother Vine are making up.’ It’s been in Vice, Guardian, Telegraph, Times and stuff this morning, so it’s cool, [but] obviously there’s a fresh type of anxiety that comes around all of that coverage. I genuinely don’t know what will happen after it comes out. I mean, I literally commit fraud. I don’t know what’s going to happen there! The lawyer in the film [Colin Witcher] is one of the leading lawyers in Britain, so he’s not fucking around. He’s not an actor.

He was one of my favourite ‘characters’ I think.

Oobah Butler: I love him so much. I met him in a pub and I was like, ‘oh my God, it’s this guy.’ I’d had this idea that I wanted to have me talking to a lawyer throughout. It was also good to have someone who’s not impressed by me at all, completely cutting me down like, ‘you’re just not clever, you’re not funny.’ That was sort of perfect really, because no one wants to watch me being smug for an hour. He’s a real antidote for my annoying face.

I liked the part where he realises he’s given away thousands of pounds of free legal advice and almost become part of the heist himself.

Oobah Butler: He can’t stop himself laughing, it’s great. There are people dotted throughout the film who I think are really great. My nieces are little stars. My sister texted me saying ‘I can’t wait to start a YouTube of my daughter’s unboxing weapons.’ She’s taken it in her stride very well.

It was a smart move to have your six-year-old niece order the knives on the Alexa. It really revealed the absurdity of the whole process.

Oobah Butler: Yeah, it’s crazy. It’s sort of a twisted bit. We had to fight quite hard to get that in the film, and I’m really glad we did because I think it’s my favourite bit. Legally speaking, it could have just been me doing the orders. It doesn’t actually matter how old the person who’s ordering it, it’s just whether it should be age-verified. With every single one of the items we ordered, none of them were. Amazon have queried whether some of the items we ordered needed to be age-verified. They admit that four should have been and taken them down or reclassified them. But we did multiple orders of those four, tens of them, so the figure is a little bit unusual.

In comparison to previous stunts, like the fake restaurant and scamming your way into Paris Fashion Week, this is on a much bigger scale and making more of a moral point. Was that the purpose, and is this where your filmmaking is headed?

Oobah Butler: I’m getting older! So I guess so. I don’t know, really, to be honest. I’m just drawn to things. It’s very instinctual. I was drawn to Amazon because of how they’ve become part of the fabric of everything – in terms of the high streets looking different post-pandemic, being one of the biggest employers, walking down the street and seeing so many Amazon boxes outside of people’s houses, the amount of drivers that you come into contact with. Go to any fulfilment centre, I’m yet to not find bottles of piss outside of them. They’re really impacting the way that things look, so I was just drawn to that. I’m ultimately trying to make myself and other people laugh and to do things that are outrageous, but you can’t stop your worldview being a part of that.

“Amazon drivers pissing in bottles is like this weird, open secret, and I thought, ‘how the fuck do you make something about this that actually has impact?’” – Oobah Butler

You mentioned the bottles of piss outside the fulfilment centres, which you branded and re-sold as RELEASE Energy. Did you actually ship any out?

Oobah Butler: No, we didn’t. We could’ve, but we didn’t. We had real people try to buy it and we ignored them and cancelled the orders. It was all people on a big spreadsheet who we’d contacted and were happy to do it, but then there were names popping up of people we hadn’t asked which is wild. Listing them I was shocked by it, and kind of entertained. But then reflecting I thought, ‘shit, I could put anything in this.’

It reminded me a bit of KSI and Logan Paul’s PRIME.

Oobah Butler: Well I can’t say that, you can! It’s very jovial – there’s a lot of me huffing piss in this film. I watched it with my mum and my auntie and they saw that, but then when the journalist Alex Press talked about female drivers getting UTIs from holding their piss in, that’s the stuff where they sat up in their chair like, ‘what the fuck.’ So it was a weird stunt. It was one of the things I didn’t really think was possible. And the fact that Amazon’s algorithm was the reason we were able to bypass their protections is kind of wild.

There’s silly moments like bottling the piss, but there’s also some dicey stuff. You went undercover in the Coventry fulfilment centre and had to walk through metal detectors to get in and out. You also accidentally introduced yourself as Oobah to your colleagues instead of using your fake name. What was going through your head during those moments?

Oobah Butler: We’d done so much work to get inside and I really didn’t want to fuck it up, and repeatedly almost did. I’ve never done this before. There are seasoned journalists who spend their lives doing this amazing work and that is definitely not me. It’s difficult work. Then you’ve got this camera strapped onto you. I used to work in a warehouse when I was like 18 and it was such a different experience. This was so much more intense. The surveillance, the way they watch you, the airport scanners. It makes you feel very anxious. In the film one person says they associate the feeling with being a prisoner. That’s kind of a fucking insane thing to feel from your workplace.

Were you expecting to get caught?

Oobah Butler: By day three, because it hadn’t happened instantly I was like, ‘no chance, it’s not happening.’ I was determined by that point. Because obviously I was at the heart of that union story. Literally part of that employment surge that they did, allegedly. But then I got caught on my third day. I mean, the disguise was a little bit Mrs Doubtfire, wasn’t it? It wasn’t amazing. It’s funny how [the manager] just rinsed me for it as well.

“The surveillance, the way they watch you, the airport scanners… one worker said they associate the feeling with being a prisoner. That’s kind of a fucking insane thing to feel from your workplace” – Oobah Butler

Do you think Jeff himself has got wind of the heist?

Oobah Butler: I would love to know. I don’t know if it’s escalated to his level yet. I just tweeted at him saying thanks for the knives.

What would you say to him, face-to-face?

Oobah Butler: I would say, ‘brother Bezos, come here, let’s have a hug. Have you got £25,000 I can borrow? Yes, you do.’ We did have an ambition that we would try and get him in the film, but it’s just finding that kind of person, one of the richest men on the planet.

It was great when you actually dressed up as him though.

Oobah Butler: Channel 4 were like ‘we’ve run out of money, we can’t pay for this,’ and I just thought fuck it I’ll pay for it myself. So I paid a make-up artist to make me bald. I mean, it was ridiculous. The whole point of the film is trying not to be self-righteous, or telling people what to do with their lives. I didn’t want to be like ‘you need to delete your Amazon account.’ Just look at all this stuff [that they’re doing], and you guys are smart enough to make your own decisions. It is ubiquitous, though. NDAnoway.com, the website from the film where you can get Colin’s free ‘legal advice’, that’s probably hosted on Amazon Web Services. Most of the internet is. It’s not that I’m above Amazon, I’m just trying to drag them down to my level.

Oobah Butler’s The Great Amazon Heist is available to stream now on channel4.com.

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