Oh Florida! Tampa Man Busted Using Cellphone Jammer

A man in Florida constructed his own cell phone jammer and was blanking out the calls of every driver on the road around him. For safety. It lasted two years before the FCC finally tracked him down. The cellular companies were tracking moving interference with calls back and forth on the Interstate 4 corridor. Hilarious, but a big no no unless you are DHS I guess.

From Fox here:

A Florida man is facing a $48,000 fine for using a “jammer” in his SUV to keep people around him off of the phone while he was driving.

The Federal Communications Commission says that Jason R. Humphreys used a phone jammer in his vehicle during his daily commute on I-4 between Seffner and Tampa for about two years before he was caught.

Metro PCS alerted the Feds of an issue in April of 2013. The company noticed that its cell phone tower sites had been experiencing interference during the morning and evening commutes.

Agents from the FCC used direction finding techniques to find that strong wideband emissions were coming out of a blue Toyota Highlander SUV driven by Humphreys.

The FCC says that jamming devices cannot be authorized because they can compromise the integrity of the nation’s communications infrastructure, including 911 and police calls during an emergency.

Who wouldn’t love to have a device that would disrupt the phone calls of idiots driving sloppily down the road? I reckon his big mistake was leaving it on full time.