Stop Right There, Criminal Scum

2006catchphraseclassic

Published September 29, 2026

The Imperial Guard's stiffly delivered warning from The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion became a durable gaming catchphrase after players kept getting stopped for petty in-game crimes. YouTube supercuts, Tumblr edits and Reddit mashups turned the guard's flat voice acting into a template fans still quote to call out rule-breaking behavior nearly two decades later.

catchphrase memesgaminglate 2000s memesdialogue edit memescrime memes

Overview

Stop Right There, Criminal Scum is one of several arrest lines shouted by the Imperial Guard NPCs in Bethesda's 2006 role-playing game The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion1. The catchphrase travels with a small family of sibling lines, including "Stop! You've violated the law!" and "Then pay with your blood!", all delivered in the guard's famously stilted voice acting4. Fans quote the phrases whenever someone is caught doing something petty, from in-game theft screenshots to jokes about rule breaking online.

The format usually shows up two ways. Text posts paste the guard's transcribed line as a punchline under a screenshot of a minor infraction, and image macros crop the helmeted guard's face, often heavily compressed or distorted for extra effect7. Video edits lean on the same dialogue clips looped, autotuned or remixed into songs2. The comedic weight comes from the mismatch between the guard's grave tone and the trivial nature of whatever crime triggered the confrontation.

Origin & Background

Platform
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (game) / YouTube (viral spread)
Date
2006

Bethesda Softworks released The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion in the United States on March 20, 20061. When a player character committed a crime, nearby Imperial Guards would run up and confront them with a scripted rotation of lines including "Stop right there, criminal scum!" and "Pay the court a fine or serve your sentence."9 Bethesda developed the game itself; the meme grew out of fan clips of the arrest dialogue rather than from a single credited creator, and no individual is documented as the format's originator.

How It Spread

The first big viral moment came on March 18, 2007, when YouTuber Alex Cottrell uploaded "The Imperial Guard Song," a musical remix stitched together from the guard's arrest lines2. About a year later, on March 27, 2008, YouTuber Spas Man posted a straight supercut of Oblivion arrest scenes that pulled more than 1.6 million views3.

Sibling lines picked up their own followings on other platforms. On December 23, 2010, Urban Dictionary user Emporer Septim wrote a definition for "Stop! You have violated the law!" that gathered more than 725 upvotes5. In 2011, YouTuber hankmecrankme uploaded a short clip of the "Then pay with your blood!" line that drew more than 40,000 views over the following decade6.

By the late 2010s the guard was being pasted into unrelated contexts. On December 18, 2018, Tumblr user danishbuttercookies posted a distorted variation of the guard image macro during discussion of the Tumblr adult content ban, and the post picked up more than 51,000 notes7. On January 17, 2019, Reddit user AlpacaPunch999 mashed the guard's dialogue over stills from Sam Raimi's Spider-Man films in a post on r/raimimemes8.

How to Use This Meme

Common convention is to reply with the line, or a still of the guard, whenever someone posts about breaking a rule, however trivial. The catchphrase is often typed in all caps to mimic the guard's shouted delivery, and image macros typically use a low-resolution or distorted crop of the guard's face to lean into the joke about early-2000s game visuals.

Frequently Asked Questions