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.