One Company, Many Names: Inside the ContactMeASAP and GorillaText Operation
Federal inmates get one official way to message the outside: TRULINCS, the Bureau’s email system, reached through the free CorrLinks portal. Every inmate who wants to message has to use it, because it is the only channel the Bureau allows. That leaves room for companies to sell a convenience layer on top: texting from a family’s own phone, a dedicated number for the inmate, photo prints. In a companion piece we profiled the one company that actually built that layer. This piece is about the other kind. ContactMeASAP and GorillaText charge families $20 to $30 a month for the layer, and in case after case they take the payment and never deliver the service. When families never sign up at all, the same operation calls them anyway.
What they sell
ContactMeASAP relays text messages between a family’s phone and the inmate’s TRULINCS terminal, assigns the inmate a dedicated number, and prints photos. The Basic plan is $20 a month, Premium is $30, with an upsell called AI Assistant Diamond. The site claims to be female owned and operated, “As Seen on TV & People Magazine,” and rated 4.7 stars on Google. We found no trace of the television or magazine coverage anywhere, and the Google rating is not something we could reproduce.
GorillaText sells the same service under a different name at the same prices, with the same promise of unlimited texts. The structured data it hands to search engines describes it as an “Inmate Communication Referral Service.” That turns out to be an accurate description.
One checkout, many brands
GorillaText’s domain was registered on June 24, 2026, through the same registrar as contactmeasap.com and pointed at the same Cloudflare nameservers. We verified the connection electronically rather than by resemblance. The signup code on GorillaText’s site builds its payment link per ContactMeASAP’s own specification, sending the family’s email, phone number, and the inmate’s register number to a Stripe checkout page on contactmeasap.com, tagged ref=gorillatext. There is one payment gateway with several brands standing in front of it.
The brands keep multiplying. GorillaText runs a partner page that recruits other TRULINCS resellers into a referral network at $5 to $50 per completed signup. The complaints reaching FixingBOP describe the brands also being used as masks. Inmates using other virtual assistant and texting platforms report being spammed with fake invoices that pretend to come from the platform they were already using, steering the payment to the ContactMeASAP and GorillaText operation instead. Families and friends report automated calls demanding payment for services, even though the inmate had no account with ContactMeASAP or GorillaText at all.
The complaint file
The Better Business Bureau lists ContactMeAsap under Marketing Programs, not corrections, at an address in Burnsville, Minnesota. Its rating is F, with twelve complaints on file and eight left unanswered. The BBB names Christopher Smith as CEO and owner and records a change of ownership on January 1, 2025. Trustpilot holds two reviews, both describing money taken and no service delivered. On Reddit, in r/PrisonWives and r/ExCons, families describe paying for months of service that never activated and getting the runaround from support. One Trustpilot reviewer connected the brands without any help from us: “dont think about doing gorillatext.com because they own that to.”
Charging for a convenience layer is a fair business when the service works. Here the recurring complaint is that the payment goes through and nothing arrives on the other side. Impersonating a rival platform to redirect a payment is a step beyond that, and the collection calls to people who never opened an account are a step beyond that again.
The back end
Behind the storefronts sits reliadata.io. It started in 2023 as a seller of mobile proxies, “premium USA 4g/5g” connections sold to people who were tired of getting blocked online. Its certificate history shows what it became: phone infrastructure in fall 2025, then device management, WebRTC, and SMS into spring 2026. The application at app.reliadata.io is an outbound calling platform with agent SIP accounts, caller ID groups, voice broadcast, voicemail drops, and AI dialogues, riding on the Bandwidth carrier network. We verified the connection between this platform and the front brands through the same electronic records. It is the kind of kit that produces a call from a new number every time, which is exactly what the BBB reviewers describe: solicitation calls at all hours, always from a different number, impossible to block.
Why this keeps happening
The Bureau created this market. TRULINCS is free and it works, but it is terminal bound and text only, so every family that wants a phone number in the loop becomes a customer for someone. Most inmate texting operations are fly-by-night setups that appear, collect deposits, and vanish. This operation layered a referral network and an outbound dialer on top of that formula, and the fake invoices move it from undelivered service into outright predation. The July 2026 award of the BOP tablet contract to Securus will eventually retire the current messaging stack, and operations like this one will either follow the families onto the next system or dissolve before then.
Until then the advice is simple. The CorrLinks portal is free and it is the baseline. A reseller can add real convenience on top of it, but only if it delivers what it sells, and every message runs through the same monitored TRULINCS channel either way, so no company can claim a faster or more compliant route than the portal itself. Check the complaint file before paying, and anyone receiving a payment call about an account they never opened should treat it the way the complaint files describe it: a collection attempt with no account behind it.