An Ontario man is accused of carrying out malicious online pranks
The Smoking Gun, an investigative U.S. Website, has outed an Ontario man as the leader of an online prankster community. Tariq Malik is allegedly behind Pranknet, an “online chat room” whose members make prank phone calls—and then transmit them live on the site. But the Pranknet jokes haven’t had everyone laughing. Andrew Goldberg, managing editor of The Smoking Gun, points to one prank as being especially nasty: “There’s one from New Hampshire where you understand the ultimate end goal is to humiliate people—just to embarrass, humiliate them and to degrade them as much as possible for sheer entertainment,” Goldberg explained. In this case, two female KFC employees were tricked—by a caller posing as a representative from the KFC head office—into turning on the restaurant’s fire suppressor system. Afterwards, they were told that the chemicals raining down on them were hazardous, and convinced to run outside and strip naked in the freezing cold. The Pranknet website is no longer in operation. Police are investigating several related incidents.