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Feds Not Amused by Area Man’s Crank Calls to Coast Guard, Filing of Tax Returns for Hookers

So. You’re 22 years old, you operate an Internet escort service out of your house and you’re feeling a little bored. What’s a man-child to do?

Well, making the assumption that you spend a lot of your spare time watching old Crank Yankers episodes, you might ring up the Coast Guard and tell them a shuttle at the Kennedy Space Center is about to be under attack.

Or if that doesn’t get the fired stoked in your plums, try calling them up again to say that your yacht is sinking off the coast of New York with ’10 souls’ on board.

Yeah! That’s the ticket:

Nicholas Barbati of Daytona Beach twice made the U.S. Coast Guard scramble to check out false information he gave them on separate occasions — including reports of a threat from the sea headed for a space shuttle about to take off from the Kennedy Space Center, federal officials said Tuesday.

Barbati, 22, also called the Coast Guard in Washington, D.C., to tell them his 32-foot yacht was sinking off the coast of New York, investigators said.

Oh. And about those escorts, “Barbati pleaded guilty to the two hoax cases in August, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said. Then, in October, Barbati pleaded guilty to filing false claims with the IRS. He filed income tax returns for prostitutes employed by his Internet escort service operating out of his house, investigators said.”

Now you may be thinking that Barbati was just a little mischievous and he just made some poor decisions. Let us dispel that notion from your head right now:

Barbati’s computer was seized and it showed Barbati had made 584 other harassing and hoax calls. Between May and June 2009, Barbati made “swatting” calls to law enforcement dispatch centers around the world so dispatchers could not identify where the calls came from, investigators said.

In one case, Barbati told dispatchers he was going to kill a baby if the police did not arrive soon and gave a fictitious address, the release said.

But back to the hookers for second – if you’re going to provide employer-prepared tax returns, the least you could do is prepare the them accurately. You don’t want the Better Business Bureau on your case.

Prank calls to Coast Guard, dispatch centers land man in federal prison [DBNJ]