A months-long rental scam that hopped county lines and crossed state borders has landed a Hollywood man in the Monroe County jail, after deputies say he walked off with a high-end sewer-inspection camera from a Marathon rental shop and never looked back.
Monroe County detectives describe the case as a multi-jurisdiction probe that eventually stretched as far as North Carolina. The investigation pulled in agencies from several Florida counties as they tried to link a string of suspicious equipment rentals to the same suspect.
It all started in December 2025, when Sunbelt Rentals in Marathon reported that a customer rented a specialized sewer camera worth about $14,400 and failed to return it. Not exactly a cheap weekend rental. Investigators say the person who signed the paperwork used a fake name and an inactive credit card, leaving behind a trail of bogus information that took some serious legwork to unravel, according to reporting by the Tampa Free Press…