10 Years Ago, The Kardashians Pulled Off The Todd Kraines Prank

Publish date: 2024-05-03

Over the years, the Kardashians have carried out countless pranks against each other: from simple one-offs, like Kim recently telling her family she’d be the Bachelorette, to the complicated and cruel, like Kris pretending she’d been tackled by Kim’s security team (neck brace and all). But the show’s best prank falls somewhere in the middle of the mischief spectrum — and it just turned 10 years old.

As seen in Keeping Up with the Kardashians Season 8, it started with a series of phone calls. Spurred on by the Kardashian sisters, Scott Disick would call Kris Jenner and pretend to be a man named Todd Kraines. Kraines, a realtor, is a longtime family friend, so it wouldn’t be totally out of the question for him to send Kris a friendly “hello.” But Kris quickly realized the man on the other end of the phone wasn’t actually Todd, thanks to Scott’s bizarre, high-pitched impression forever immortalized in KUWTK lore: “Auntie Kris! It’s me, Todd Kraines!”

It wasn’t just phone calls, though. The fake Todd Kraines would send Kris gifts, too, from flowers at home to champagne when she was dining out at Nobu. Naturally, the KarJenner matriarch was worried she might have a stalker. Realizing it might be time for the charade to end, the pranksters called Todd to confess — and request his presence for an epic reveal at Kris’ house.

While everyone was hanging out in the kitchen, Kourtney answered a call from the security gate and let Todd in. Kris was terrified: “They just said Todd Kraines is at the gate, and you said OK? What if it’s the f*cking fake Todd Kraines?!”

But to her relief, the actual Todd Kraines was at her door — and Scott revealed he’d been impersonating Todd all along. A decade has passed since the prank’s grand finale (which aired on Aug. 18, 2013), but it’s lived on in viewers’ hearts. As part of an April Fool’s Day PSA in 2018, for example, Todd said he’d even get questions about the Kardashians from his clients.

Todd seems to be a good sport about the prank, telling Bustle in 2017 that the experience “was a lot of fun.” Well — in hindsight, at least. At the time, “it was a little unnerving,” he explained.

“When it was going on, I had no idea, and the fact that Kris was calling me, ‘Is this you? Are you doing this?’ I’m like, what are you talking about?” he recalled. “I got kind of nervous, because it kept going on for six months. I was like, do we need to call the feds? What guy is using my name?”

Not only is the prank hilarious to watch 10 years later, but it’s also the perfect time capsule for a specific era of the Kardashians, when the family was cranking out roughly 20 45-minute episodes a season. There was more than enough screen time for casual hijinks that spanned multiple installments, unlike their current Hulu series, which usually delivers 10 drama-filled episodes per season.

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