Payloads aboard drones used to drop contraband into prisons around the world usually comprise drugs, tobacco, and cellphones, though one curiously creative – and now definitely busted – trio in Australia decided to diversify its illicit recreational cargo by adding a USB drive filled with porn to the mix.
A high court in the Australian city of Brisbane convicted three defendants last Friday for their roles in a 2022 attempt to use a drone to fly $119,000 ($76,400) worth of drugs and digitized dirty movies into a Queensland prison. The attempted launch of the illegal form of aerial delivery services bit the dust – almost literally – when the UAV used crashed while attempting to drop its payload in the penitentiary’s exercise yard.
Prison guards came across the downed drone and discovered it carrying 79 strips of the opioid Buprenorphine – each worth from $1,000 ($642) to $1,500 ($964) on internal contraband market, according to Australian prosecutors – and 0.94 grams of methamphetamine. No estimated value was given for the porn content on the accompanying USB drive.
Cheyenne Anniki Petryszyn, 27, spearheaded the plot to feed the prison’s internal black market with contraband from the outside, in partnership with an inmate distributor, and just-sprung parolee who provided details on the intended drop zone.
After the attempted flight failed, Petryszyn tipped off Australian authorities about her involvement during monitored calls to her convict associate, when she broke from their habitually coded conversations about fishing to note “everything crashed and burned” – presumably during about a topic entirely unrelated to shrimps and barbies.
The slip allowed authorities to use the barcode on the drone to connect it to Petryszyn’s purchase a month before the attempted delivery. Petryszyn, who has reportedly been involved in previous drug trafficking and murder cases, pleaded guilty and was convicted, as were her co-defendants.
Australia is one of the many nations battling the growing problem of drones being used to ferry contraband into penitentiaries for resale – and now becomes the first to report XXX movies being among captured payloads.
Whether such illegal aerial drops have been organized by current inmates, parolees, outside helpers, or – as in the recent Queensland case – all three, plots to sneak drugs, tobacco, and at times weapons into jails have become a recurrent cause of eruptions of violence among inmates, and thus a major headache for correctional officials worldwide.
Counter-UAV detection and mitigation solutions have been installed in some facilities in response. But in most cases budgetary restrictions have limited preventive measures to visual monitoring and overhead netting to thwart deliveries, or introduced rudimentary drone monitoring and identification tech.
Photo: Vince Mig
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