Free Republic

NOVEMBER 23--Joseph Jones, 73, was sleeping in a Motel 6 room in Spartanburg, South Carolina late Sunday evening when he was awakened by a phone call. The male caller, who identified himself as a hotel administrator, spun out a bizarre story about a prior guest having left “highly sophisticated cameras” in the guest’s room. The man told Jones that “he would tell him what to do to get rid of them,” according to a Spartanburg County Sheriff’s Office report. At the caller’s direction, Jones took the ceramic toilet tank cover and smashed the television (presumably a hiding place for a...

A TSG investigation unmasks the leader of Pranknet and the miscreants behind a year-long wave of phone call criminality AUGUST 4--At 4:15 AM on a recent Tuesday, on a quiet, darkened street in Windsor, Ontario, a man was wrapping up another long day tormenting and terrorizing strangers on the telephone. Working from a sparsely furnished two-bedroom apartment in a ramshackle building a block from the Detroit River, the man, nicknamed "Dex", heads a network of so-called pranksters who have spent more than a year engaged in an orgy of criminal activity--vandalism, threats, harassment, impersonation, hacking, and other assorted felonies and...