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Watching a swatting hoax unfold right in front of him
By adamg on Sun, 04/05/2015 - 6:54pm
Paul McNamara reports he was on his way to pick up some pizza at a place in the middle of Hopkinton last night when he couldn't help but notice the half dozen police vehicles blocking Main Street.
The instant a bystander told me what he had heard, I knew this police operation was almost certainly the result of a hoax known as Swatting, which starts with a fake 911 call reporting a non-existent life-threatening situation. It’s become an epidemic of late, targeting celebrities and online gamers, in particular.
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Comments
How new is new?
How is this different from the countless fake bomb reports and "suspicious" package calls they get all the time? Of course if they screen 911 calls soon or later you'll get a false positive and people will get hurt.
Seeing as how any cell phone irrespective of age or plan can be used to call 911 this would seem like a hard person to track down. But perhaps the police will get lucky and the reporter used a phone or device they can trace.
The police do not generally
The police do not generally burst in guns-a-blazing when they get suspicious package and fake bomb reports. Swatting is absolutely repugnant because it exploits some regrettable aspects of modern day US police tactics to terrorize innocent people, and there is a very real danger that the victim may be shot dead. The likelihood of tracing the call to an individual is very low, unless they are a complete dunce. The calls are typically made through VOIP, and good luck tracing that.
I'd say it's different than
I'd say it's different than your "standard" bomb threat, where the bomb threat is often an attempt to either stop something from happening (school kids calling it in on exam day...) or someone trying to extort money (lots of stores get these phone calls saying they'll get blown up unless they deposit money by a certain means), the intent of swatting is to cause the actual, and significant police response to whatever location they claim to be at.
and is dangerous to the victim
If you swat someone, they have a SWAT team responding to their home thinking that there's a dangerous situation. One misstep and you have a dead victim. And how do you explain to your little kids why an armed SWAT team has shown up?
This has become a serious issue for those being harassed. Some targets are being swatted so often that the local police departments now know to double check any call. It's dangerous and also an expensive waste of police resources, not to mention tying up police who might be needed elsewhere.
http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/23/4253014/swatting-911-prank-wont-stop-h...
They use a web program to
They use a web program to spoof the number.
Very different
Most of the time, in a swatting, the call appears to be coming from the house being swatted, or a neighbor next door, and the calls stress that the person being swatted is incredibly violent/has killed/is about to kill/maim/torture.
Very far from the average bomb threat.
One could almost characterize many swattings...
... as attempted murders, By being falsely reported to be a violent threat, the victim of the swatting could be killed (or maimed) by police.
In other words ...
Murder by cop. (As opposed to "suicide by cop")
2 Main Reasons:
As another poster said, unlike a bomb threat, which is often called in by an idiot who doesn't want to have to be somewhere (like school), recent SWATing hoaxes often "target" a particular individual. Every attempt is made to convince the police that a specific person is dangerous and threatening extreme violence. If the police trust the report too much, or anything goes wrong, the victims of the hoax could easily wind up dead.
The other reason I would call this "new" is that it has happened a lot with online video game broadcasters. Angry nerds with an axe to grind have taken to calling in threats while online personalities that they don't like are broadcasting live, so they can watch the police storm their house in real time. It's despicable: https://youtu.be/TiW-BVPCbZk
Has there ever been a single
Has there ever been a single called-in bomb threat in the U.S. that turned out to be genuine? Every bombing in the U.S. I've ever heard of happened without the bomb being discovered before going off, and I've never heard of a case of a genuine bomb being called in and then diffused by the bomb squad. These calls are always hoaxes.
swatting is psychotic
Besides wasting police emergency resources that might be needed elsewhere, there's a significant chance of getting household members killed, and/or a cop killed. And also getting the family dog killed. All of these things have happened before. I think most people who do swatting know this. People who swat should be looking at attempted murder charges.
Guns blazing
Cops go in aggressively to many situations where they should not. They often use SWAT teams to conduct searches for drugs based on spurious information. They often aggressively escalate situations with mentally disturbed people resulting in that persons death. As mentioned above family pets are often killed. Also as mentioned above, swatting "exploits some regrettable aspects of modern day US police tactics to terrorize innocent people." If swatting is very likely to get people killed, it's another reason why it's important to reform police culture and rewrite procedures and training to be more effective during tense situations and to not misuse SWAT teams. 50-70,000 SWAT raids a year is many thousands too many.
Let's hear the call!
I would love to hear the originating phone call....why haven't they released it?