Imagine opening your door to see a swarm of heavily armed SWAT officers pointing their guns at you. You don’t know what’s happening. You have no idea why they’re raiding your home and kicking doors open.
If this happens to you, you’ve become a victim of swatting. This means that someone placed a hoax 911 call to send authorities to your house. Many celebrities have become victims to this insidious “prank” and while it might seem like a joke for some, it can become extremely dangerous, even deadly.
What Is Swatting?
Swatting is a deliberate, insidious, and malicious act that involves making a fake call to emergency services. The goal is to send the police or SWAT (hence the name) to a scene where no crime or emergency exists.
The caller will often pretend to be a victim, a bystander like a neighbor, or the suspect himself. The bogus report will often be about an ongoing hostage situation, a home invasion, an active shooter, an act of terror, a bomb threat, or any act of extreme violence.
The purpose is to elicit a significant law enforcement response to make sure that a swarm of police storm into the unsuspecting victim’s home or place of work. Sometimes done as an act of retaliation, other times done for “fun”, swatters do this to make law enforcement confront the victim at gunpoint.
Many celebrities, popular video game streamers, and other famous people have become victims of swatting. According to a report by the US Office of Homeland Security, some swatting incidents have even targeted schools, malls, and hospitals.
“The FBI has seen an increase in foreign actors paid to ‘swat’ American facilities, often by a disgruntled student or employee of the target.” There has even been an increase in cases of swatting against police officers, judges, and politicians.
What Is Stream Swatting?
In recent years swatting has become popular among video gaming streamers. Some do it for “fun”, as a form of retaliation against a rival streamer, or to distract another streamer while playing. It can also be done by an angry fan or a viewer who thinks it will be funny to see their favorite streamer getting swatted live.
Since streamers have their cameras on to share video and audio to their viewers while showing their game stream, if they get swatted, the whole scene—police storming inside the home, conducting searches—will happen live in front of the camera.
Swatting: A Cruel Prank
It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt. Swatting is a serious offense that can cause harm to victims and cause authorities thousands of dollars. Imagine taking officers’ time away from real emergencies elsewhere?
Furthermore, authorities would have to barricade streets, lockdown certain areas, organize experts and special response teams, then send enforcements into the home or establishments. It’s a waste of time and resources; thousands of dollars worth.
And then people get hurt.
How Swatting Injured Tyran Dobbs
In 2015, US-based gamer Tyran Dobbs, suffered extensive damage to his face after police responders shot him with rubber bullets. Apparently, the police were responding to a call to the Terrorism Hotline.
The swatter who pretended to be Tyran Dobbs declared that he had a gun and several bags of explosives. He threatened to kill hostages unless $15,000 was delivered to his address.
Responding to the call, police stormed Dobbs's home in Maryland and shot him in the face and chest. It broke bones in his face and caused bruising on the unsuspecting victim’s lungs.
How Swatting Killed Andrew Finch
In 2017, this dastardly act turned deadly.
A swatting that stemmed from an argument over a Call of Duty game caused the death of an unwitting third party in Wichita.
The city’s SWAT team was called to the home of Andrew Finch after a report was filed about a man who had killed his father and was holding other family members hostage. This led the police to mistakenly shoot Finch at his front door.
The call was from gamer Casey Viner who had an argument with a teammate who had killed his character in the game.
Viner enlisted the help of another person to swat the teammate. It turned out, the target didn’t live in that address anymore. Instead, a new family including Finch, who did not know anything about the online argument, was the one living in the house.
What Tech Do Swatters Use?
The act of calling SWAT into someone’s home was first reported in 2008 and in recent years it has evolved into something more sinister. It picked up tools to make calls anonymous.
Many of these swatters use doxxing, spoofing, social engineering, and a teletypewriter (TTY) relay system.
Doxxing is searching for and exposing people’s private information online. These can include things like telephone numbers and home addresses. Some doxxers will do this as a form of retaliation. They will post someone’s private information online and encourage others to take it a step further. Such steps can include swatting.
Other times, a swatter will take it upon themselves to search for a target’s address from online databases. They can also use social engineering techniques to get their victim’s personal information. Once they have it, they will use caller ID spoofing to make dispatchers or operators think that the call is coming from somewhere else.
They can make it seem like the call is coming from inside the target’s home, somewhere nearby if they are pretending to be a bystander, or elsewhere to try to hide their identity. A teletypewriter or TTY on the other hand can be used to further hide their identity.
A TTY system is normally used by persons who are speech or hearing impaired so they can use a phone to communicate with other people. A user can type a message on a TTY machine, an operator then calls the other party and reads the typed message to the person on the other end of the line. In the case of swatters, they use the TTY machine to add another mask of anonymity when placing a 911 call.
How Do I Protect Myself From Swatting?
The most important step you must take is to practice proper identity hygiene. Make sure you don’t have personal information posted in any of your social media accounts or any pages online.
Be aware of data breaches that may have leaked your information online. Sites like Have I Been Pwned, can help you check if your accounts have been part of any recent data leaks and if your information’s already being sold on the dark web.
Also, be wary of phishing emails and messages that are designed to harvest your information.
Use a VPN
A VPN or Virtual Private Network allows for a much more secure, private, and encrypted connection between your device and the website you are trying to access. It creates an extra layer of privacy by protecting your connection and data from hackers even over unsecure networks.
Using a VPN can help you hide your IP address and thereby obscure your location. So you could be using the Internet from somewhere but appear to be elsewhere. Using a VPN, you can change your location and set it to almost anywhere in the world. It does this by sending your traffic through a server in a different location.
Swatting Is A Crime
Swatting is a serious concern that can cause serious injuries and even death. It is not a simple prank people should be doing for fun, on a whim, or as a form of retaliation. Thousands of dollars worth of resources have been lost due to swatting which also takes attention away from legitimate emergencies.
To protect yourself from this, you need to practice proper digital hygiene. Make sure you don’t share personal information online especially your home address.