An Ontario man may be the ringleader of an online network of cruel pranksters responsible for a number of dangerous hoaxes, alleges the investigative website, The Smoking Gun.

After a lengthy investigation, The Smoking Gun says it has figured out who has been running PrankNET, a website on which cruel prank phone calls have been broadcast live over the Internet.

The site alleges 25-year-old Windsor resident Tariq Malik, who goes by the online handle of "Dex" is one of the group's masterminds. His "second-in-command" is allegedly a 51-year-old Toronto man who calls himself "Hempster."

No charges have been laid.

PrankNET is a community of secret members who have taken the teenage game of crank phone calls to a new -- and more vicious -- level. The pranksters have called random hotel guests or posters on Craigslist, recording the conversation as they prod the unwitting victims to commit such acts as destroying hotel rooms and restaurants, drinking their own urine, and stripping naked in public.

One incident repeated a few times involves waking up a hotel guest and posing as a front desk employee. In one instance in Pennsylvania, the victim was told a ruptured gas line in the hotel required them to place wet towels around their door and to break a window.

The victim was then told to smash the room's television "since the tube contained an electrical charge that could spark an explosion," The Smoking Gun describes in their report. The guest complied, using the toilet's tank lid, as the caller suggested, and then throwing the TV out the window, again, at the urging of the caller.

"This has happened a number of times and there's a great deal of damage," The Smoking Gun's managing editor Andrew Goldberg told CTV's Canada AM on Friday from New York.

One of the cruelest pranks involved three female employees at a KFC outlet in Manchester, N.H., who were called by a PrankNET member posing as a head office representative and told to turn on the store's fire suppression system, to test it. The system rained down chemicals on the employees, damaging the restaurant.

The caller then told the employees the chemicals were hazardous and that they would need to step outside and strip naked.

"What it led to was them taking off their clothing, standing in the parking lot, and urinating on each other to negate the effects of this chemical," said Goldberg.

"It's really about debasing and humiliating people," he said.

Goldberg and another Smoking Gun colleague decided to expose the PrankNET masterminds by joining the underground community and taking on a seven-week investigation. He found that PrankNET pranksters seem to know each other only through the online community.

"There is very little contact. Many of them don't even know the real names of the other people on it," he says.

"They spend their days -- and I mean large chunks of time, sometimes 15 or 17 hours at a time -- making calls to people in hotels to people on Craigslist. They use Skype so that it masks their phone number."

Goldberg says they were able to track down Malik by following his online handle, and tracking his IP address. They eventually confronted Malik at his mother's home, but he refused to speak to them and instead called police.

The Smoking Gun says it has turned over the information it has uncovered to the FBI, but no charges have been laid against any PrankNET member. While local police have investigated each prank, the FBI and the RCMP have not confirmed whether a cross-border investigation is underway.