Pranknet: an exercise in pwnage brought to you by The Smoking Gun

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2009/0803091pranknet1.html

Semi-followup interview/story with the TSG editor:

http://www.vancouversun.com/Ontario+leader+notorious+pranksters+website+claims/1859973/story.html

It's kind of great that someone so gleeful about his ability to socially engineer others was so skillfully socially engineered into giving up his location.

holy jeezus, this guy.. so much for "is your refrigerator running?" then, I guess.

Dan's righteous fury over misuse of the name Dex is touching.

hahahaha that did immediately jump out at me when I first read this

http://i.cdn.turner.com/trutv/thesmokinggun.com/graphics/prank/tylercap.jpg

A classy cadre inclusive of chimos!

On a recently deleted MySpace page, Markle (whose full name is James Tyler Markle) listed his body type as "6' 6" / Athletic," though that is an exaggeration, according to one source. He plays on a recreational softball team, dresses like a goth, and loves the "Twilight" series of books (his Twitter account, "3DW4RD_B3LL4," is an alphanumeric tribute to the vampire saga's main characters). Markle also happens to be a regular at the area's only gay bar, though he is not old enough to drink and lists his orientation as "Straight" on his former MySpace page. Fellow patrons would likely be interested to learn of his frequent homophobic rants while on the Pranknet mic, not to mention his repeated threats to violate men and women with a chair leg.

The Twilight fandom is the perfect detail here.

that article cuts off rather abruptly, I wanted to read more!

It seems unlikely to me that all of these guys are going to get rounded up and arrested, there's too much geographic displacement and while the crimes are legitimate, no individual crime seems really serious enough for law enforcement to give a crap.

Interesting that it's being reported by Canadian news outlets, but no American ones, save a blog on a newspaper site from Kansas.