TikTok ghoul who filmed Nicola Bulley’s body being pulled from the river is ‘fraudster who tricked women into taking gym pictures’

• Curtis Arnold, 34, duped police officers on the day the mother-of-two’s body
• He has received swathes of criticism, and is now revealed as reported trickster

A TikTok ghoul who secretly filmed Nicola Bulley’s body being retrieved from the river is reportedly a fraudster who tricked women into taking gym pictures.

Curtis Arnold, 34, barged his way into the official press area and duped police officers on the day the mother-of-two’s body was found before posting the distasteful content to his online accounts. 

The barber, who has no journalistic credentials, insists he is offering ‘media and journalism done differently’ to ‘help get justice for those who can’t’.

But he has received swathes of fierce criticism over the grim footage of officers using a body bag on the water’s edge, with his social media channels also including a number of hurtful and scandalous headlines about Ms Bulley’s case.

And Arnold is also a ‘narcissistic’ and ‘manipulative’ trickster with a number of previous criminal convictions – including drink driving, burglary and fraud, The Sun reports.

Curtis Arnold, 34, covertly filmed Nicola Bulley’s body being lifted from the river. Arnold has revealed the lengths to which he and others will go to achieve their ends

Arnold also posted footage of the ashen-faced couple in shock after finding 45-year-old mother-of-two Nicola’s body in reeds by the River Wyre on February 19

His most recent criminal conviction is said to have come for a fraud charge in 2018, for which he served a custodial sentence, while his criminality stretches back to when he was in his 20s.

Arnold also reportedly posed as a fitness modelling agent and visited a number of gyms across London under the guise of being on the search for female models to promote a range of leggings.

READ MORE: Unmasked: The TikTok ghoul who covertly filmed Nicola Bulley’s body being lifted from the river

Instead, though, he is said to have taken a number of sexualised photos and videos before sharing them on social media without permission to promote his own fitness products.

Arnold reportedly served his sentence at HMP Wormwood Scrubs following a conviction for fraud by false representation, where he was said to have been unpopular with staff.

A prison source told The Sun: ‘He was a very narcissistic, manipulative individual and would regularly try to manipulate female staff, especially education staff.

‘He was slimy and would tell them they were beautiful or he preferred them over another officer.

‘He would say very inappropriate things and would ask for their mobile numbers and ask to see them outside of the prison.

‘But when he started asking female staff to smuggle in phones and drugs for him, it all went down on his report.’

Arnold was reportedly sacked from a reception orderly role after it was alleged he was ‘part of a group smuggling items’ into the prison.

He is also said to have been handed a six-month suspended sentence at Hereford Crown Court in March 2010 for perverting the course of justice after altering his car’s registration plate.

The barber returned to court in October later the same year reportedly for breaching the suspended sentence for drink driving on the M6.

In November, he is said to have admitted receiving two stolen registration plates.

He is also understood to have broken into the garage of a property and stolen tools in Kidderminster, before pleading guilty to burglary.

But Arnold reportedly avoided a stint in prison after the judge said he had shown signs of maturity 

Now Arnold has received widespread backlash and public anger after posting footage of the ashen-faced couple in shock after finding 45-year-old mother-of-two Nicola’s body in reeds by the River Wyre on February 19. 

The athletically-built powerlifter makes regular six-hour round trips from his Worcestershire home to St Michael’s on Wyre, Lancashire, and films with a GoPro camera strapped to his chest. 

His latest video was posted on Saturday – the day after he was unmasked as being the sleuth behind the sickening eight-minute clip.

It opens with Arnold driving back to the village, saying: ‘This is actually the drive that you would have to do if you were going to transport anything – AKA perhaps Nicola – to the location.’

He continues: ‘Most of the country are speculating that possibly Nicola was not in that river the whole time.’

Arnold duped a police officer into letting him continue walking along a road close to where Ms Bulley’s body was found 

Nicola Bulley pictured with her partner Paul Ansell. Arnold’s video was posted on YouTube and TikTok on an account called Nicola Bulley Case —later rebranded as Curtis Media — which sometimes used a profile picture of Mr Ansell

Showing a shallow section of the River Wyre close up, Arnold adds: ‘Is that what the police want us to believe that she was in there all this time?’

Arnold then films canoes and a boat lying abandoned in nearby fields, before suggesting they could have been used to move a body during a 25-minute video already watched 60,000 times on YouTube alone.

READ MORE: ‘Rest in peace Nikki’: Hundreds gather at candlelit vigil for Nicola Bulley in her home town and pay tribute to mother-of-two who ‘touched hearts in every possible way’

Arnold has so far earned almost £1,000 in royalties from his channels covering the case.

His footage – possibly the most controversial and distasteful of all the material that has swamped TikTok and YouTube in the wake of Ms Bulley’s disappearance a month ago – attracted nearly a million views. 

The most sickening was footage covertly taken of police retrieving Ms Bulley’s body from the River Wyre.

Earlier, he was asked to turn back while walking along a nearby road, but duped an officer into letting him through by claiming that he needs to return to his parked car and saying that he is from Blackpool.

As dozens of officers gathered and a police helicopter and drone hovered overhead, Arnold asked a female police officer: ‘What’s going on down there? I’ve walked down and he wouldn’t let me pass’.

She also directed him to leave the area, but the video then cuts to Arnold filming covertly as officers at the side of the river. 

But who exactly is Curtis? 

The Mail tracked Curtis down from his digital footprint to a town centre barber’s shop in the Midlands. 

Inside was an athletically built young man in a tight-fitting T-shirt, knee-length shorts and trainers, clipping the hair of a middle-aged customer. 

Asked if he was behind the notorious video, he replied ‘Yes. How did you find me?’

He admitted that he lied to police and crouched in a field to film covertly on his Samsung S21 smartphone.

Arnold us single and lives in a three-bedroom detached house near the barber’s shop he has been running for the past two years. 

He made five six-hour round trips to St Michael’s on Wyre in the space of ten days to acquire ‘content’ for his channel.

The barber gleefully revealed the £716.06 in royalties that he made from YouTube alone, adding: ‘It is probably £900 by now but it takes a while to come through.

‘My ambition is to be a full-time YouTuber and make a good living from it. The income potential is there and I love doing what I am doing on the channel.’

His first viral videos were of ‘car fishing’ – vehicles coming unstuck attempting to drive through deep water – at Rufford ford near Newark, Nottinghamshire.

Someone who knows Arnold well said: ‘He was not making any money initially and was desperate to monetise his car fishing “fail” videos. He will do anything for more views to make money.

‘He gives all TikTok-ers a bad reputation. He is not reporting news. What he is doing is monetising people’s peril or anything else he can. This all needs regulating properly. It’s like the Wild West.’

Arnold tried to justify smearing the reputation of Nicola’s grief-stricken partner Mr Ansell, saying: ‘I felt he was hiding something when I watched him being interviewed on TV.

Mother of two Nicola Bulley was discovered on Sunday morning in the River Wyre in Lancashire, more than three weeks after she disappeared

Nicola Bulley with her partner Paul Ansell. Mr Ansell revealed that he and the family are in ‘agony’ after a dogwalker found Nicola’s body in the reeds of the River Wyre

‘I was hoping my videos would trigger a member of the public to come forward with new information.’

Another of his videos about Ms Bulley has been viewed almost 100,000 times on YouTube.

He has also been criticised for a video he uploaded to another of his channels, ‘Curtis Cool Stuff’, on February 18 of a ‘possible burial site’.

Arnold claims that his covert filming triggered death threats. 

He said: ‘I know that has caused a lot of controversy and if it has caused her family any distress, I apologise. 

‘If they saw it, it can’t have been a nice thing for them to have seen and I’m sorry about that.’

But he remains undeterred: “I intend to follow as many breaking news stories as I can in the future and put them on the channel.

‘It gives the public a chance to get closer to the event and in the Nicola case I wanted people to watch my footage and see if they noticed that me or the police had missed anything.’

Floral tributes were left at the bandstand as family friends of Ms Bulley said: ‘Our hearts are broken without you. A void will always be in our hearts, but her memory will live on’

Experts say that social media algorithms encourage and reward controversial content like Arnold’s.

There have been 400 million views on TikTok alone of videos with the hashtag ‘NicolaBulley’.

They include over half a million views of 26-year-old ‘psychic’ Lucy Hesford-Buckingham, from Wales, sharing her vision on the case before Nicola’s body was found.

In her video, she claimed that she sensed intuitively from an ‘overwhelming smell of lemon bleach’ that Nicola was still alive but being held captive and in ‘severe danger’.

So many sleuths descended on St Michael’s on Wyre that, at one point, police had to issue a 48-hour dispersal order to clear the village of outsiders.

TikTok insists that it removes content and accounts that engage in bullying and harassment or otherwise violate its policies.

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