Social media star Kai Cenat appeared to hang YouTube magician Max Major by the neck from a noose in shocking footage – but it was later revealed it was all just a sick prank meant to scare the viral streamer.

Cenat’s livestream showed the 40-year-old major standing shirtless on a raised yellow platform, his hands tied and a noose around his neck attached to a counterweight. He asked Cenat to choose between two colored ropes and pull one.

When he selected the red rope, the noose immediately lifted Major into the air, who appeared to begin choking while the panicked streamer and his friends stood helplessly by.

“What the fuck? Wait, no, no! I won’t be banned! Well, I could get banned! Is he good? I’ll stay here. I’ll stay here! Can I stay here?” Cenat said desperately to a cameraman.

In the footage, medics could be seen surrounding the fallen wizard – but Major had one last trick up his sleeve.

Hours later, he posted a YouTube video revealing that Cenat had unwittingly fallen victim to an elaborate ruse designed to scare the living daylights out of him.

“When you look at this, it means something went terribly wrong… but what you don’t know is that everything went according to my plan,” he said in the video.

“Look, at the beginning of my performance I said that tonight was all about decisions. But not just the decisions you made tonight, but the decisions you’ve made since the day we met,” he said, claiming he had been meticulously conditioning the Twitch star all along opting for the red rope, thereby setting the climax of the prank in motion.

Cenat is known for pulling pranks himself, and the elaborately constructed “hanging” segment was several hours into a marathon stream specifically designed to boost his subscriber count. So it’s entirely possible that Cenat was also involved in the gag.

However, he later criticized Major for what he called a “selfish” stunt, claiming the YouTube wizard with 1.1 million followers was trying to make black people look bad.

“Let him go! He wants n–s to look like black people who look crazy. This is how things should look. It’s not worth it, brother. When we yell at him, we look like a whole bunch of black people looking crazy. So let God sort it out, bro,” he later complained on his stream.

The stunt isn’t the first time a hanging has controversially entered the world of livestreaming.

In 2018, YouTuber Logan Paul uploaded a video showing a dead person hanging from a tree in Japan’s “suicide forest” – he later apologized and claimed he was just trying to raise awareness.

Cenat, 22, who has more than 20 million followers between YouTube and livestreaming platform Twitch, caused chaos in the Big Apple last July after he showed up at Union Square to give away a PS5 video game console.

Huge crowds pushed through the area, throwing bottles and other objects at police and bystanders. Cenat was unlicensed and was initially charged with inciting a riot and unlawful assembly, but Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg later dropped the charges.