It’s happening again: Firefighter impersonator convinces hotel clerks to vandalize building
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STATter911.com coverage of similar pranks in 2009
Clerks from two Albuquerque hotels are the latest victims of a prank that we first told you about five-years-ago. A caller, often pretending to be a firefighter, tricks a clerk working the overnight shift into damaging the hotel in an effort to solve a problem with the fire alarm system or sprinkler system.
“It just happened to be our unlucky night,” said Dhawal Kholwadwala, owner of the Econo Lodge on Carlisle.
It sounds unbelievable, but the caller was able to trick the clerk into breaking a window in the lobby and she could have been seriously hurt.
“She was in tears when I came in last night to speak with her about the incident,” he said.
It was close to 2:30 in the morning when the woman who worked the front desk at the Econo Lodge on Carlisle heard the fire alarm go off.
Motel management say they have protocol for shutting off false alarms. They say the woman was half-way through the process when she got a phone call from a man claiming to be with AFD.
He told her there was a problem with the sensor and she needed to break out the windows to turn off the alarm. Yet, once she put a flashlight through the glass, the man called back.
He told her she had been pranked.
