PARENTS in Florida have discovered the ultimate tool to keep naughty kids in line: a horrifying clown named Wrinkles.

The clown has been spotted in the US state’s southwest since 2013 and now the man behind the nightmarish mask has revealed the motivation behind his appearances.

Wrinkles, who has been spotted in a red and white polka-dot suit with a frightful rubber mask with deep black eye sockets, is the creation of a professional clown, Joel Mason of Collier County.

He explained to a local reporter that he is a kind of nightmare-for-hire.

“People pay me to go scare their friends, to dance at their parties, bar mitzvahs — it’s limitless,” he told WBBH.

“Ever since these kids put me on the internet, my phone rings non-stop.”

Mason later explained to The Washington Post that he was recently hired by a mum to help keep her misbehaving 12-year-old in line.

“He was scared of clowns and I showed up across the street from him at the bus stop and he just started crying in front of his friends and ran home,” Wrinkles said.

“His mother called back a few days later and said, ‘Thank you!’ Now when he acts bad, she just has to ask him: ‘Do you want Wrinkles to come back?’”

Mason keeps up the act as a way to push against today’s sanitised world where parents wrap their kids in cotton wool.

“I’m just a good old-fashioned clown,” he told the Post. “When I was a kid, it was OK to scare kids and now they’re all whiny and scared.

“I want to bring scary back.”

And while he may be keeping Florida residents up at night, Mason is having the time of his life.

“I just want to have fun, have a good time, make a little extra money on the side, have a little fun before I die,” he told WWBH.

There is now a social media account dedicated to sightings of Wrinkles throughout Florida.