A hotel guest near Orlando International Airport in Florida inadvertently did more than $5,000 in damage to his hotel room following a prank call alerting him to a non-existent “gas leak.”
The caller, posing as a member of hotel staff, lead the guest onto the expensive trail of destruction at a Hilton Garden Inn. The guest ripped out the toilet seat to smash in the bathroom mirror in order to retrieve “hidden gas masks.” (Perhaps not the sharpest crayon in the box, huh?) The caller also instructed the man to use a lamp to break through a wall and alert another guest. Finally, the guest was told to throw the mattresses out the window to “jump to safety.”
Following complaints of noise from other guests, manager Samir Patel investigated the kerfuffle. He let the unidentified guest know there was no gas leak and luckily for the guest, was present for a follow-up prank call. Patel indicated that upon asking the caller to identify themselves, he heard “several people laughing” before they hung up. Patel also mentioned that he’d recently received a memo about similar pranks occurring in other states.
Police have little information to go on other than a front-desk employee’s description of the caller as “very abrasive.” The prank could have been much worse, too. Earlier this year in Arkansas, a similar prank saw a hotel employee do $50,000 worth of damage after a call instructing him to “test the sprinkler systems.”
[Source: The Orlando Sentinel]
