Free William Banks/Jail Saga 1 Favorite 

William Banks is a comedian and artist who, prior to his viral prison saga in 2025, was best known for a community that he led called Call World, which he describes on the website as “a planet in an alternate universe ruled by human-headed Worms sexually obsessed with William Banks.” The story goes that Banks was first visited by a worm from Car World after getting stuck in an industrial freezer and coming to terms with his death before eventually being found. He built something of a real following, with tens of thousands of views on his TikTok videos and, according to the Car World website, branches in fifty cities across five continents.
Banks' next work was “Jail Saga,” which started getting attention on December 9, 2024 when he tweeted “got a phone” with a low quality photo from inside of a jail cell with two other men. The tweet went viral and people began to circulate the news report covering his arrest from earlier that year. In February he had turned himself in to police for taking down Israeli flags from yards in Connecticut. According to Banks’ Twitter he had been sentenced to eight months in prison. The responses to the tweet varied with some reacting to the humor of the image or asking if that was the guy from Car World, while others expressed outrage at the harsh punishment or voiced their support of Palestine. This had come after a year of people being fired or expelled from schools for protesting against Israel’s attacks on Gaza following October 7th.
Over the next several weeks Banks posted videos of himself in his cell with his cellmate, Ant, as well as interactions with other prisoners. The videos were mostly him being naive or annoying and Ant getting short with him. In one example Banks is showing the viewer a drawing of a Christmas tree and the Christmas gift he is preparing for a bully in the prison when Ant forces him to sing jingle bells and do push ups. Banks gets upset and asks Ant to stop, saying, “don’t do that to me, that’s what the other guy was doing to me.” He then tells the story of a guy putting a foot on his back while he was doing push ups, saying, “he said it’s because of who I am and how I look.” Many of his videos follow the same formula and find their humor in Banks playing the part of a silly, weird white boy learning to get by in prison with Ant’s help. As time goes on, Ant warms up to Banks and defends him against other prisoners, and Banks eventually begins to thrive in prison, learning and spreading Islam. The initial buzz died down after the first few videos, but some clips continued to get sporadic attention.
He went viral again on February 20th after posting a video of him and several other inmates in a prison break (5), crawling under a fence and sprinting to freedom. The video has tens of millions of views and was reposted by several news accounts– the most prominent one being BRICS news with 1.3 million followers. Over the next few days the video was all over, with most just cheering him on, but some trying to determine if the escape was legitimate. One user with 13.7k followers tweeted “the one thing keeping me going is that the William Banks jailbreak is actually real,”that day with a photo of the police report for his arrest, and tweeted the very next day that he was wrong and Banks had recently been sighted in New York, with photo evidence. Eventually, people seemed to recognize that it was not entirely real but continued to play along.
In the midst of this viral moment Banks launched a cryptocoin on pump.fun, a trading platform for memecoins. The coin was called White Moses, which he had been calling himself in his videos. After the coin’s value skyrocketed from people quickly buying it, Banks sold his shares and profited, a move that is called a “rug pull” in crypto communities. People were initially angry, many calling him a scammer. However, shortly after, Banks posted that he had donated fifty thousand dollars of profit from his coin to five charities supporting Gaza with screenshots of the donations. “William Banks is Robin Hood,” the tweet read. The reaction switched to overwhelming praise, one user writing “he escaped from jail to immediately rugpull a bunch of crypto bros to donate the money to Palestine… he might be the greatest to ever do it.” In the following weeks he continued to post videos of him on the run with his new girlfriend and had a “Welcome Home William Banks” party in Bushwick with over 1,200 RSVPs.