The Vine – by Jake ClelandBack in the good old days, we might order a hundred pizzas to someone’s house, or sign them up for unsavoury email newsletters, but today’s online pranksters go to the extremes. The new thing is calling SWAT teams to people’s houses. Like, assault-rifles-pointed-at-your-family SWAT teams.
Kotaku reports that last week, 60,000 people watched Runescape streamer Koopatroopa787, aka Joshua Peters, abruptly leave his stream after his mother told him cops were at the door. He later released a video tearfully explaining that the SWAT team came in, had pointed an assault rifle at his 10 year old brother, and that if something had gone wrong, the idiot who’d called the SWAT team to his house could’ve gotten Peters’ family killed.
According to The Guardian, the caller obtained Peters’ personal details and then reported gunshots at the Peters residence, playing fake gunshot sounds in the background of the call to make it more credible. Pretty scary stuff.
Kotaku spoke to someone who had participated in swatting before, who claimed it was about feeling “all-knowing” and “special.” “Being able to intimidate someone is really fun,” he said. He also revealed how swatters obtain the necessary information, mostly from ostensibly secure sites like PayPal and Amazon and even your ISP, to all of which you’ve given your personal details. Here’s the scariest bit:
“People argue that people can die when they’re swatted. People can get shot. Which is true. People would say this on the call with the department: ‘If I see a police officer without the money, I will shoot him on sight.’ Once you start threatening police officers, they’re more likely to fucking shoot someone.”
Kotaku also offer some security tips, which are generally good advice for anyone of you giving your information to any website, even if you’re not a Twitch video game streamer with tens of thousands of viewers. Nevertheless, as long as people can keep getting away with it, people will probably continue to get visits from assault rifle-wielding, ready-to-shoot police officers. And that’s alarming.