A Georgia man went ahead and skipped the whole door-knocking-for-access thing when it came to securing (and selling) prime hunting land in the Sunshine State. Operating from his digs at a Georgia penitentiary, Rodney Edward Smith created a small illegal enterprise that only required a few smuggled cell phones and some trusting hunters.
Previously booked in on false imprisonment and other charges, Smith calls Macon State Prison home, and it was there where the 39-year-old allegedly spent the better part of a year running a hunting lease scam that stretched across 15 Florida counties. The hustle took place between July 2025 and April 2026, during which time Smith used a number of contraband phones, an ever-rotating cast of online aliases, social media profiles and phone numbers to post up fake lease ads for land he obviously didn’t own and had never stepped foot on.
Sure enough, the phone(s) started to ring, allowing Smith to negotiate terms, collect deposits and eventually walk off with thousands of dollars from Florida hunters who were duped into thinking they’d just secure a nice chunk of land to chase deer, hogs and birds.
Thankfully, the boys and girls at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission eventually caught up with his antics and were able to formally charge him back in May with a quartet of felonies. This week, our man was extradited to Florida and is now being held on a $700,000 bond.
The only question that remains is, how exactly was this allowed to happen?
As it would turn out, Peach State prisons have a cell phone problem so bad that it borders on performance art. Rather than being used to keep in touch with family and friends, these contraband comms devices are the building blocks of criminal infrastructure inside state penitentiaries. Instead of calling to check in on mom, inmates are using them to run drug operations, order hits, coordinate crime on “the outside”, and, in this case, sell imaginary hunting rights in Florida. The problem has become so severe that even though inmates are paying handsomely, staff members have been outed for smuggling them in. Removing the risk of relying on humans, Georgia prisons are now battling the more modern problem of coordinated drone drops.
Yes, Georgia correctional facilities have become regular dropzones for hundreds of unmanned aircraft that, like a stork delivering a baby in the night, drop phones, drugs, tobacco and even the occasional saw blade. Recent federal cases in the Macon area have detailed sophisticated drone rings flying “drops” into multiple prisons, while officers are reportedly watching drones crash-land in the yard with phones wrapped in black cloth.
In 2024 alone, it was reported that the Georgia Department of Corrections seized more than 15,000 cell phones and over 150 drones, leaving state attorneys scrambling to get the FCC to allow them to jam signals in prison-covered airspace.
And while a hunting scam is probably the least of the penitentiary’s concerns, the unfortunate reality of this particular scenario is that hunting leases in Florida still run, to a surprising degree, on trust. Plenty of land continues to be leased through Facebook groups, word of mouth, and short text conversations, and it’s not irregular for hunters to send deposits to hold a spot before they ever meet the landowner or walk the property.
Most of the time it works out, but when it doesn’t, the damage is more than financial. Every successful scam makes the next legitimate landowner a little harder to trust and the next honest hunter a little more suspicious.
"By offering fraudulent hunting leases, he not only stole from Florida people, but also damaged the trust between hunters and landowners that is essential to Florida's hunting tradition," said Lt. Col. Randy Bowlin, FWC deputy director of law enforcement over Investigations and Intelligence.
Stay diligent out there, friends.
