Kate Yup: The Mukbang Hostage?

Anonymity is a hell of a drug. For most of my life, I used a pseudonym online because I didn’t want my online persona to be connected with my real life in any way. Despite being well known in the online Magic: The Gathering community, I was not interested in being well known when I went to Magic tournaments or events. It didn’t help that my online persona was a caricature, a Colbert Show-style exaggeration of my actual identity, trying to prey on comedic edginess for clicks. It helped even less that I was much younger and more stupid, so looking back at some of my writing is a bit cringe-inducing. To be honest, when I first contacted Simon about writing for him, it was very difficult to find anything from my past that I could consider to be a suitable writing sample. But overall, my anonymity worked out pretty well. My real-world friends knew my identity, but that was fine. Unfortunately, it meant that some real-world people I was not actually friends with knew my identity, which led to an internet stranger successfully doxxing me, but even that turned out okay. I went from being one of Magic’s greatest villains to being a sympathetic character overnight, and watching the hate and vitriol being spewed at the person who had decided to dox me was more than a little satisfying.

Then I embarked on a project which would be both my most successful, and my biggest mistake: I started a podcast with a couple other well-known Magic douchebags. By the standards of the day, it was a very popular show. By today’s standards, our numbers wouldn’t have even been enough to get sponsored by Raid: Shadow Legends. Still, we had a lot of fun making the show, and for the longest time I thought the only thing I wouldn’t like about it was having to do the editing (Thank you, Jen!).

That all changed one day when I went to a Grand Prix, Magic’s largest open-invitation tournaments. I went outside for a smoke between rounds, and while talking to someone about how the event was going, a stranger recognized my voice from the show. He walked up to me and said, “Hey man, I just wanted to say I’m a big fan.” While I was polite about it and we wound up becoming friends, my immediate thought when this happened was “I don’t like this.

I don’t like this at all. I do not want this to be a part of my life whenever I go to compete in a tournament.” I was only recognized a few times over the years, but it was still more than I would have liked.

Remaining as anonymous as possible can be very easy as a writer, and even as a disembodied voice on a podcast, but what about for a YouTuber? There is now the option of being a VTuber, or Virtual YouTuber, who uses an avatar and never shows their face, something along the lines of Corpse Husband or Ironmouse. That works well to conceal your identity for playing games, but if you wanted a career as a mukbang YouTuber, someone who eats massive quantities of food for the camera, hiding your identity to avoid public recognition could be a bit trickier. Even trickier still would be someone else trying to hide the identity of the person on camera in the hopes that no one would ever recognize or come looking for her.

Who Is Kate Yup?

On March 12, 2018, a YouTube channel was registered under the name Kate Yup. Her first video was published about a month later. In the video we see Kate, a petite woman, likely of Southeast Asian descent, wearing a blue mask to conceal her face from the mouth up, and devouring 11 pounds (that’s 5 kg) of raw salmon.

The video opens with her whispering the words “today, salmon challenge,” and that is as much of her voice as anyone would ever hear. Aside from the occasional few words whispered, she never spoke. It’s a good way for a person to hide their true speaking voice, and most videos did not even contain a whisper, at least not from her.

Her entire channel was dedicated to ASMR mukbang. As a person who is not a fan of either of these things, this was incredibly painful for me to research, so you’re welcome. It was clear from the start that Kate wanted her identity to remain hidden.

Even the profile picture for her YouTube channel wasn’t her, it was just a stock photo of some woman eating fries and a burger. As the months went on, Kate uploaded more videos, every one featuring her consuming an unholy amount of seafood.

For anyone unfamiliar with mukbang, it is a trend that began in South Korea. Koreans love their portmanteaus, with mukbang being a combination of “meokneun” meaning “eating” and “bangsong” meaning “broadcast.” I always thought “bangsong” meant Barry White, but this South Korean trend was trying to set a different kind of mood. Mukbang was traditionally done via livestream, with the broadcaster chatting with their audience while eating; that was really the whole point of it. Kate Yup’s videos began gaining popularity early on for their much more unusual take. It was never streamed, she never spoke, rarely whispered, and it was always vast amounts of seafood. It’s not uncommon for mukbang to feature people eating far more food than they ever should, or for there to be an ASMR component. Still, there was something unusual about her videos. She seemed to just be a petite, quirky girl who just loved seafood a little too much and wanted to keep her anonymity, but this made people even more curious about who she was.

It’s one thing to quietly remain anonymous, but when someone goes out of their way to make it clear to their viewers that they want to be anonymous as Kate had, they’re going to experience the full force of the Streisand Effect. Now, with the full, stalker-like attention of her viewers, every movement, every bite, and every breath was going to be under the most intense scrutiny imaginable.

A Dark Turn

Okay, forget about placing attention on the minutia of Kate’s videos, how about the giant fucking bruise on her arm and the cut-open lip that appeared in one of her videos? This was when people went from being intrigued to concerned. In each of her videos, she appeared to be eating faster and faster, as if being forced to eat by someone off camera. The injuries were also a major red flag, and her explanation did not help. She claimed that the bruise on her arm was from the sun and that the cut on her lip was herpes. While many videos and amateur internet sleuths will claim otherwise, these are both plausible answers. She had a similar blemish on her lip in many videos, normally in the same spot, which would be consistent with cold sores. Considering the vigor with which she plunged face-first into shellfish, it is also possible they were simply cuts from a sharp piece of shell. As for the skin, people with darker skin can have dark spots caused by exposure to the sun that look very much like bruises. It’s a common enough problem that they sell over-the-counter creams for that at most drugstores.

Still, people were in full-on conspiracy mode so these explanations were not deemed satisfactory by the masses, and they kept digging. It didn’t take long for this search to turn something up. While she claimed to be recording alone, in many of her videos you can hear a male whisper to her things like “just eat,” “swallow,” and “faster.”

In one video, she begins to slow down and the table jolts as if being kicked, while in another video when her eating has slowed, the bowl of dipping sauce she dunks all her seafood in is pushed closer to her, indicating to hurry up and eat. There are claims that at one point the male voice whispers “I kill you.” I was able to distinctly hear the word “kill,” but no matter how many times I listened I could not make out the full sentence over the incessant slurping and swallowing of pound after pound of raw seafood.

Okay Kevin, take a deep breath. Simon didn’t request this topic, you did this to yourself, so quit whining about how much you hate mukbang and get on with it.

While it was only later, after the alleged bruises appeared, that people began to notice these things, they were there all along. In Kate Yup’s very first video, about halfway through, you can hear the sound of a chair move, followed by a footstep approaching the direction of the microphone. Kate does not react to this at all, not even when a male voice can very distinctly be heard to whisper “suck my cock.”

A few seconds later, between mouthfuls of salmon, Kate whispers “I love this,” so I suppose we can’t rule out some sort of Rule 34 fetish situation yet. There are a lot of theories about what’s going on here, and we will cover as many of them as possible, but one thing is for certain: whatever is going on in these videos has been going on since the start.

The videos already had a potentially injured woman and the voices of alleged male captors, how much deeper could this mystery get? A lot.

Fans starting to become concerned that the already slender Kate Yup appeared to be losing weight, despite eating these massive amounts of food. This is not necessarily incongruous with other mukbang streamers or professional competitive eaters, as they often spend extreme amounts of time working out so as to not die from all the food they eat. Were this the case however, one would expect Kate’s appearance to either stay the same or for her to become more muscular and toned since having started her channel, instead of her already small arms just becoming smaller.

There’s also the small matter of her teeth, which had a nasty habit of breaking and falling out during her videos. Fortunately it only happened in two videos, but that’s still two videos too many for someone to reach into their mouth and pull out a tooth. It was immediately speculated that the damage to her teeth was a result of abuse.

To fans, the most compelling detail of all, however, were the messages that Kate hid in her videos. English is clearly not her first language, and there’s a lot of evidence pointing to her living in France. While she rarely spoke in the videos, she would often edit them afterwards to include captions about what was going on, usually in a fun and light-hearted manner.

In one of these captions, she says “The meat is So deliciOuS,” and immediately viewers noticed that the letters S.O.S. were capitalized. This would give me pause at first as well, but watching through her videos and checking out the other captions, she is prone to misspellings and arbitrary capitalizations. It’s a shame that Kate isn’t a natural born citizen, because it sounds like she has what it takes to be President of the United States.

While this could easily be a coincidence, there are many that believe it is not.

Kate, or whoever was running her channel, were clearly aware of all the theories surrounding her. On August 15, 2019, she posted another mukbang video titled “I Am Alive,” as a response to all the comments that she was in danger. However, viewers quickly noticed the first four captions that appeared on the screen: “Hey!!

I’m still alive my friends, you can see to my smile. Everything is ok for me. Look at me, are you really thinking I am forced to eat?

Prawn, just smaller than giant shrimps and easier to eat cause I removed the skin.” The first letter of each of these sentences was H-E-L-P. This one seems like much less of a coincidence.

There is also a video in which Kate starts tapping her bowl of dipping sauce, which a commenter immediately identified as Morse Code for “I need help.” Several others immediately pointed out that no, no it’s not, and that if it was intended to be Morse Code for anything, it was completely unintelligible. These latter comments were irrelevant, because the previous one had so many likes already that it was the first comment anybody would see, and one comment deep is as far as most people are willing to research on the internet.

The straw that broke the internet conspiracy theorists’ back, however, came on November 10, 2019. This was when the video in which she lost two teeth was uploaded. Near the end of the video, her caption reads “Oh my God. I can die in peace after this bite.” She was never heard from again.

The Theories

There are an incredible amount of theories surrounding Kate Yup that range from the plausible to the outlandish. Two theories that gained popularity were attempts to identify who the girl in the videos was. One theory claimed it was a missing 16-year-old girl from California, even though she didn’t go missing until six months after Kate Yup’s channel started.

Another claimed it was a Polish UFC fighter who didn’t want to sully her career by having a mukbang YouTube channel. On the surface, this was more believable. It gave a rational explanation for her cuts and bruises.

That’s it though, that’s all this theory offered. The moles on their necks were different, the UFC fighter could be seen on Instagram with different cuts and bruises than Kate had, and Kate also had a tattoo which the fighter did not. Kate wore a wristband in most of her videos that covered her tattoo, but there were times when it became exposed.

It is unclear whether she was deliberately trying to cover the tattoo, or if the wristband was just there so she could wipe her mouth without using her hands, as is fairly common among mukbang streamers. Another alternative would be to take a breath between bites and use a fucking napkin, you savages. These are not the only people accused of being Kate, they were just the two that caught on.

But from all the evidence tying this missing girl and this UFC fighter to Kate, there was one thing that could be said for certain: if you are female, your skin is at least one shade darker than eggshell, and you have a chin, you look EXACTLY like Kate Yup.

I should probably mention the tattoo, since that’s one of the first things investigators ask about in a missing persons case. Kate had a small tattoo of a heart with an infinity symbol through it on her wrist, the symbol for polyamory. It’s unfortunately not a unique enough design to be particularly helpful, though if she was polyamorous then perhaps the “suck my cock” comment in her first video didn’t garner a response from her because it wasn’t being said to her.

Likewise, her “I love this” comment could have been describing some fetish of watching her partners go to town while she sat there eating. I’m just spitballing here and I know that sounds a bit out there, but it’s a lot more reasonable to me than the next theory.

To that end, what’s an internet mystery without a good, old-fashioned kidnapping conspiracy? The prevailing opinion on the internet is that, whoever Kate Yup is, she is a victim of kidnapping. It explains the bruises, the voices telling her to eat faster, the alleged hidden messages, her identity being kept hidden, her teeth falling out, why she eats so ravenously as if having been starved for days, and why she never speaks.

When the idea she was tapping Morse Code went viral, she posted a pinned comment on the video explaining that it was not, but the post was in quotation marks and written in the third person. It was quickly discovered to have just been copied and pasted from a comment on Reddit. It was speculated that her captors didn’t speak English very well, a reasonable assumption since everything was written in rather broken English, and it was easier to copy and paste this comment than try to explain it themselves.

The kidnapping conspiracy made a lot of sense, and it tied everything up in a neat little bow with absolutely no loose threads that could cast doubt on this theory whatsoever.

Was that a little too sarcastic for your taste? Well, if Kate was kidnapped and being forced to eat, I honestly think it raises more questions than it answers. Why was she always smiling and seemingly happy?

I am aware of the concept of acting, but the nature of these videos allow for only a single take. If she was being force-fed under duress, she would not seem so Goddamn happy all the time. People claim that she seemed less happy in her later videos, but honestly she looks plenty happy to me and I think they’re seeing what they want to see.

Had she been starved for days and then forced to eat for these videos as some people suggest, there is no way she could have finished that much food. Even when I weighed 260 pounds, the mere idea of eating that much food in one sitting would have made me retch. Competitive eaters often eat massive amounts of lettuce to stretch out their stomachs; the stomach of a person who had been denied food for days would be far too small to accommodate such incredible portions.

Another major point of contention with the whole kidnapping thing is why would her kidnappers allow her to edit her own videos and add messages into them? There are few, if any cuts in the videos, aside from the ones on Kate’s lips, so the only real editing is just adding in a few lines of text. I’m fairly confident that if the kidnappers couldn’t figure that out on their own, they could pay someone to do it for them.

I can’t possibly wrap my head around the idea that someone or someones would kidnap a person, force them to make mukbang videos for YouTube, and then hand their victim a computer with internet access because they didn’t understand how to edit or upload it. If we were to believe Kate was being held hostage, then we have to believe these are intelligent criminals since they have evaded capture to this day. Intelligent criminals don’t hand their victims the Wi-Fi password in the middle of a crime.

If you’re like the literal millions of people online that are not yet convinced that Kate Yup is not a prisoner, let me keep going. I’m sure you know that three dots, three dashes, and three more dots is Morse Code for S.O.S. Beyond that, how much Morse Code do you actually know?

The answer is probably none, because normal people can’t read Morse Code. In fact, less than 1% of the population knows how to read it. In the extraordinarily likely event that Kate did not know Morse Code before being abducted, under what circumstances would her kidnappers allow her access to resources so that she could learn it?

Kate also looked well put together. In addition to the bare necessities for a YouTube video like clean, unwrinkled clothes, her nails were always painted bright colours with no signs of chipping, and her hair was clean and shiny. A clever criminal may take the time to address these small details, but a clever criminal would probably also have a better idea for making money than building a YouTube channel from the ground up by having a hostage eat as much as $250 worth of seafood at a time, all while relying on Google AdSense to make this criminal enterprise worthwhile.

They also probably wouldn’t bother to include an e-mail address for business inquiries in the “about me” page on the channel, but Kate did. I reached out to her for an interview, but I obviously did not receive a reply. After over two years of silence and I’m sure thousands of those e-mails, it seems silly to think that I could have received a response, but I’d be a pretty shitty writer if I didn’t at least try.

It’s honestly very strange to me that this dark conspiracy is the most popular and widely accepted version of events online, as it seems to crumble under the most cursory level of critical thought. I’ll admit, in researching this story I could sometimes feel the wicked tendrils of conspiratorial thought scratching at my brain, trying to claw their way in. But there was one piece of evidence I found, completely by accident, that vanquished all of those thoughts from my mind permanently.

The Deleted Video

There are currently 29 videos on Kate Yup’s channel. I knew there was a deleted video both because I had seen clips from it, and it was heavily referenced. Also, most sources cite Kate Yup as having made 30 videos. That deleted video was the last video Kate uploaded, and it is unclear whether she deleted it herself or if it was done by YouTube for content reasons, as this was the video where she lost two of her teeth.

As it wasn’t removed until July of 2021, it is unlikely that Kate did it herself. “Okay, great, so she has a deleted video that we already know and talked about. Thanks for wasting my time, Kevin.” But in the famous words of Yoda in Simon’s all-time favourite movie franchise: “No, there is another.”

Kate had actually uploaded 31 videos, but one of them was deleted while the channel was still actively posting. This deleted video came out after all of the conspiracy talk had already begun, and it is not like any of her videos, not by a long shot. Instead of the disgusting sounds of chewing and slurping, we are instead treated to a lovely recording of the most plagiarized song of all time, Pachelbel’s Canon in D.

The video tells the tragic tale of a woman and her dead, rotting fish. The fish was not safe to consume and was going to go in the trash anyway, so the woman had a rather curious thought: if I fill this fish with Coke and Mentos, will it explode? While Diet Coke is the traditional beverage of choice for this experiment as it produces the most explosive stream, any carbonated beverage will work.

The video is ten minutes long, and Kate’s methodology is… peculiar at best. I don’t mean that as some sort of underhanded comment implying this is still related to a conspiracy, it’s just a bizarre way of doing the experiment. I’d think the obvious way to go about this would be to just pour a bunch of soda down the fish’s throat, drop a handful of Mentos in after, and see what happens; simple as that.

Instead, Kate filled a balloon with soda to try to shove that down the fish instead. But the balloon was too big, so instead of pouring some of the soda out, she just started with a fresh balloon. By the end of the video, she had gone through at least a half dozen balloons trying to get this right.

This experiment does not seem to have been particularly well thought out, and it devolves to the point where Kate cuts the fish open, puts a Coke-filled balloon inside the fish, surrounds it with Mentos, sews the fish back up, hangs it from the ceiling, and then drives her knife through the sutures to pierce the balloon. Seriously, why is the balloon a part of this process in the first place? It’s baffling, and the experiment fails spectacularly.

It would have been really cool if it worked, but her success or failure isn’t really the point. Some people saw this video and thought it was a metaphor, that she was the fish, destined for the trash with Mentos being forced down its throat. That is certainly one way the human brain is capable of interpreting what it saw, and I just hope they remembered to stretch first before performing all those mental gymnastics.

There is a less sinister way to interpret this video, and it was my instinctive, gut reaction to seeing it. What I saw on screen was a young woman with the freedom to do whatever she wanted, and with unlimited access to tools and supplies to make that happen. I also saw a woman having fun, someone who had a fish that would not be safe to eat, so she decided to try to revive an old viral craze by making a fish explode with Mentos to get views and expand her channel.

Her captions at the end of the experiment, when slightly fizzing soda began oozing out of the knife wound in the fish’s belly, read: “And for what?! Ok…this is a real fail! I’m going to focus on my usual mukbang video ^^”.

Since Simon is neither Asian nor a teenage girl, he may be unaware, but the double caret symbol at the end of her message is an anime-style smile emoticon. I don’t know why Kate would have deleted this video, other than because she did not want to highlight her failure, but I feel it did a lot to showcase her as the fun-loving, view-chasing YouTuber she probably was.

Even if Kate wasn’t in peril, there were still a lot of unanswered questions. So to address those, we must delve into the final two theories.

The Darkest Timeline

If you’re wondering what theory could be darker than Kate being the victim of kidnapping and force-feeding, my answer would simply be: how about something that’s remotely plausible? Besides, there are many ways a person can be held captive, and it doesn’t even have to be by external forces. Body dysmorphia, anxiety, depression, and other mental anguish can make a person feel more like a prisoner in their own body than any handcuffs or concrete cell ever could.

While conspiracy remains the most popular theory surrounding Kate Yup, the theory that explains virtually everything is that she suffered from bulimia. People with bulimia bruise very easily. It can cause their teeth to rot and fall out.

She always had a perfect smile in her videos, but they could also be crowns, implants, or dentures. And it would explain why Kate seemed to be losing weight despite her fairly regular mukbang videos. It also gives a possible explanation to the voices being heard telling her to eat faster, as bulimics want to remove the food from their stomachs as fast as possible so their body doesn’t absorb the calories.

Whoever else was in the room could have been enabling her eating disorder, and he wanted her to eat faster because the longer she sat there the more food she would digest. It doesn’t explain the whole “suck my cock” thing from the first video, but honestly there are a million explanations for that. It could have been anything from two different people in the room having some sort of argument over the recording process to Kate’s boyfriend trying to get a reaction out of her for a laugh.

There’s one detail from the later videos that I had left out as well. In some videos, you can see a toothbrush taped to Kate’s arm. Bulimics will often carry a toothbrush with them at all times so they have a tool with which to quickly and easily induce vomiting.

Finally, there is one last theory. It’s just a prank, bro! While the eating disorder theory does explain things really well, there’s always the chance that everything was fake.

The hidden messages, the broken teeth, none of these appeared until after the first video in which Kate appeared bruised, which was when the conspiracy theories had started flying. As a quick aside, one of the things people like to bring up as the most damning evidence that it was all fake is the broken teeth, because there is no blood. I consulted with my dentist friend, and regardless of whether the person is bulimic or not, an adult that broke or lost a tooth while eating like that will lose little if any blood.

Anyway, it is a perfectly reasonable theory that the discoloration on her arm really was caused by the sun, and that when she saw the reactions from people she decided to run with it and give them what they wanted. Her channel became more popular once people thought she was in danger, so there was no reason to set the record straight and every reason to lean in and give people more to speculate on. And upping the ante in her very last video by losing two teeth and saying that she could die now?

A masterstroke. But why do it, and more importantly why disappear without a word?

Dolla dolla bills, y’all. Kate Yup’s channel has just under 1.3 million subscribers. Of those, over 750,000 subscribed after she disappeared. To this day, two and a half years after her last video, her channel of only 29 mukbang videos receives over 2 million views every month. Even if I take the lowest end of Social Blade’s estimate, that’s almost $600 per month. If I could make $600 per month of passive income for something I did years ago, I would be all over that.

Kate’s Confession

I am torn between the last two theories. Was it an eating disorder or someone catering to conspiracy theorists to get views? It could easily be a combination of the two as well. But while she may have disappeared because she predicted how much more attention her channel would get if she did, it’s also quite possible that this whole scheme got away from her and became too much. In her antepenultimate video, one month before her disappearance, her video ends with the following captions:

As you can notice, I am happy. Nobody is torturing me.

Oh no…

…I’m lying…

In fact, there is people torturing me everyday…

Without even knowing it

All those who are continuing to spread the rumor…

While this could just have been Kate trying to stoke the flames, after all, the more she denied being in danger the more people believed that she was, it’s possible that it was all finally getting to her. Even if she decided to lean into the conspiracy theories for views, all of the comments, articles, and videos could easily have still worn her down and begun causing her mental distress. There are hundreds if not thousands of hours of videos dedicated to the story of Kate Yup, and thanks to us, now there’s one more. Oops.

Wrap Up

So what is the real identity of Kate Yup? I don’t know, and I don’t care. She wanted to be anonymous, and I don’t see why we can’t leave that well enough alone.

Was Kate kidnapped and tortured? No. According to millions of people on the internet, a phrase I say here with the same contemptuous sardonicism usually reserved for the phrase “ancient astronaut theorists believe”, it is very possible that she was, but the odds of such a thing being possible are so close to zero that it still boggles my mind this is somehow the prevailing theory.

As for the final two theories, I’m curious to hear where Simon lands on this because it being either of them or a combination of both all seem very plausible to me. While the internet took a simple mukbang channel and turned it into something it was never meant to be, the biggest mysteries that remain are “Is Kate Yup okay?”, and “Will she ever return?” Personally, I’m going to choose to believe she is fine.

Even if she had an eating disorder, her YouTube revenue should have been more than enough for her to get the help she needed.

Bonus Facts

If you go to the Wikipedia page for The Streisand Effect, the very first thing you will see is the 2003 photo of Streisand’s Malibu home, the photo she tried to suppress in the first place. How’s that working out for you, Barbra?

I was sitting in my finance class one afternoon in college, munching away on a pack of Mentos, because they’re delicious. My throat was a little dry, so without thinking I tilted my bottle of Diet Coke back into my mouth while I still had a Mentos between my back teeth. Zero out of ten, would not recommend.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Kate Yup?

Kate Yup is a YouTuber known for her ASMR mukbang videos where she eats large quantities of seafood while wearing a mask to conceal her identity. Her first video was published in April 2018.

What is mukbang?

Mukbang is a trend that began in South Korea, combining the words ‘meokneun’ (eating) and ‘bangsong’ (broadcast). It typically involves a broadcaster chatting with their audience while eating large amounts of food.

Why did Kate Yup wear a mask in her videos?

Kate Yup wore a mask to conceal her identity, indicating her desire to remain anonymous. She also used a stock photo for her YouTube channel profile picture instead of her own image.

What are some of the theories surrounding Kate Yup’s disappearance?

Theories surrounding Kate Yup’s disappearance range from her being a victim of kidnapping and forced feeding to suffering from an eating disorder like bulimia. Some also suggest it was all a prank to gain views.

What evidence supports the theory that Kate Yup was being held captive?

Evidence includes male voices heard in her videos telling her to eat faster, visible bruises and injuries, and hidden messages in her captions that seemed to indicate distress, such as ‘S.O.S’ and ‘I need help’.

What is the Streisand Effect and how does it relate to Kate Yup?

The Streisand Effect refers to the phenomenon where an attempt to hide or remove information has the unintended consequence of further publicizing that information. Kate Yup’s efforts to remain anonymous likely drew more attention to her videos.

What was the content of the deleted video on Kate Yup’s channel?

The deleted video featured Kate Yup attempting to make a fish explode using Coke and Mentos. It was unlike her typical mukbang videos and was deleted after the conspiracy theories began.

How did Kate Yup’s channel gain popularity?

Kate Yup’s channel gained popularity due to her unusual take on mukbang videos, which featured vast amounts of seafood and minimal speaking. Her anonymity and the mysterious nature of her videos also contributed to her popularity.

What is the significance of the tattoo on Kate Yup’s wrist?

Kate Yup had a small tattoo of a heart with an infinity symbol through it on her wrist, which is the symbol for polyamory. This detail was noted by investigators and internet sleuths trying to uncover her identity.

What is the current status of Kate Yup’s YouTube channel?

As of the article, Kate Yup’s YouTube channel has just under 1.3 million subscribers and receives over 2 million views every month, despite her last video being uploaded in November 2019.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: Kate Yup: The Mukbang Hostage?
• Hero image source by thegetty / openverse, cc0.