Buster

Stop Us If You've Heard This Before: Prank Caller Dials A Motel 6 Guest...

For the second time in three months, a South Carolina motel has been damaged as a result of a phone hoax bearing the fingerprints of the vandal-in-chief at Pranknet.

The Motel 6 in Spartanburg, first targeted last November, was hit again at 1 AM today by an unidentified caller who awoke a male guest in Room 208.

Pretending to be the front desk clerk, the caller told guest Timothy Leach that, “there was an emergency of toxic gas entering the rooms,” according to a Spartanburg County Sheriff’s Office report.

What followed next was pure Pranknet (or “Prank University” as it now calls itself). Leach was directed to place wet towels at the base of the room’s door. He then was directed to “disable” the room’s sprinkler head. Leach did this by striking it with a toilet tank lid (as directed by the purported clerk).

As water began gushing down and flooding the room, the caller tried to get Leach to break the bathroom mirror to access a supposed shut-off valve behind it. At this point, Leach told the caller to come to his room “as he was leaving.”

When sheriff’s deputies arrived, the local fire department was already at the Motel 6. A magistrate judge, according to the sheriff’s report, has requested further investigation to identify the caller “prior to issuing a warrant for the offense.”

At 2:15 this morning, a TSG reporter happened to begin monitoring hoax calls being placed by Tariq Malik, Pranknet’s founder. Malik, who broadcasts the calls live in Pranknet’s chat room, spent the following 90 minutes randomly dialing guests at various Motel 6 locations.

Which could lead someone to conclude that Malik, pictured at left, likely placed the 1 AM call to Leach’s room.

Comments (17)

how have these no sex having, live at home nerds not been arrested yet?
This dude is funny
Easy solution...have callers state the name of the person they wish to speak with, not just a room number.
Excellent idea!
I'm surprised that these hotel chains, after being pranked, don't have the smarts to distribute a flyer to all employees warning them of these incidents so that employees won't be caught off guard. This man needs to go to prison for what he's done...he's done it repeatedly and with malicious intent, whereas most of the others seem to quit after their first run-in with the law. His example also emboldens others to follow him in these pranks.
Wait until the Hooker's union finds out someone else has been doing tricks at the Motel 6!
Oh great. More pranking is all Motel 6 needs to make their services even worse. I'm glad they don't charge as much, but you get what you pay for with them. Many times, I've encounterd ill-functioning heating, cooling, toilets and faucets, no hot water, dingy towels, really cheap or no toiletries except soap, VERY cheap toilet paper and no tissues at all. Once, the front door wouldn't close right because someone had previously kicked it in and cold wind was pouring through the crack so we had to stuff it with toilet paper. Got $10 knocked off the bill for that. Oh, and don't let your pet roam the room until you've looked under the bed where my dog found a chicken bone once. It is nice of them, though to have Tom Bodette 'personally' give you the wake up call.
This sort of prank could be really hysterical if it weren't for the damage caused and the obvious vicious nature of the prankers. I seem to remember the last "pranknet" guy that got caught crying like a baby when they put him in jail to cool his heels for a while. The "palestinian prankster" needs to experience our jail system for a while and see how he digs that and make him pay for this and any other pranks where damage was caused.
Holy Smokes! A waiver? The guy who advocates this has to be some sort of bureaucrat or liberal that believes more paperwork and Big swollen unweildy government will" save us all from ourselves" when the fact is none of those bureacracies can find their azzes with both hands and a GPS unit
The problem is the ones that vote for bigger government and more bureaucracy are the same ones that always cheat the system to get back at "the man". Vote for the man, then cheat the man because he is always cheating you, then complain about the people that try to stop the system.