Swatting / Swatted

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About

Swatting or Swatted is a slang term and social engineering practice that involves falsely reporting incidents to emergency services in order to deploy various police units to a location. The hoaxes have been criticized for wasting taxpayer dollars and preventing emergency services from appearing where they are needed.

Origin

On December 18th, 2007, Urban Dictionary^[1] user neoeon submitted an entry for "swatting," defining the practice as calling 9-1-1 to send a SWAT team to an "unsuspecting victim's home under false pretenses."

Spread

On February 4th, 2008, the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) published an article titled "Don't Make the Call: The New Phenomenon of 'Swatting'", which described the practice and listed several prosecutions against suspected swatters.^[2] In May, Massachusetts resident Matthew Weigman (a.k.a. "Little Hacker") was arrested for being involved in a "swatting conspiracy." In January 2009, Weigman pled guilty and was sentenced to 13 years in prison.^[3] On November 19th, 2010, the emergency communications blog 9-1-1 Magazine^[5] published an article warning about the threat of "telephone swatting.

On September 10th, 2011, the gaming news blog Kotaku^[4] reported that a police unit had been sent to an Xbox Live moderator's house in Washington by gamers seeking revenge. On December 18th, 2012, CNN^[6] reported that a suspect had been arrested for making false calls to emergency services against actor Ashton Kutcher and pop star Justin Bieber. On September 10th, 2013, NBC News^[7] reported that a bill increasing penalties for swatting pranks was signed into law by California Governor Jerry Brown. On June 5th, 2014, Vice released a documentary on swatting (shown below).

Kootra Swatted

On August 27th, 2014, an online Counterstrike match livestreamed on Twitch by YouTube gamer Jordan Matthewson (a.k.a. Kootra) was raided by SWAT officers in Littleton, Colorado after a 911 caller claimed a man had shot several coworkers in the Creatures LLC office building he was playing in. That day, YouTuber Amund Johnsen uploaded a recording of the incident, which gathered upwards of 2.3 million views and 9,800 comments in the next 48 hours.

Lil Wayne Swatted

On the morning of March 11th, 2015, Miami's local news station WSVN reported via Twitter that the Miami Beach Police Department (MBPD) has dispatched a S.W.A.T team in response to an emergency call about a shooting that had allegedly left four people injured at American rapper Lil Wayne's beach house.

In the following hours, the news quickly spread across Twitter as well as the entertainment news blogosphere. At 1:50 p.m. (EST), Lil Wayne's record label Young Money Entertainment tweeted a message revealing that the rapper is safe and that he was not home at the time of the alleged incidents (shown below, left). By 2:55 p.m., Miami Beach Police Department released an official statement via Twitter declaring that the emergency call has been determined to be a hoax, using the hashtag #swatting (shown below, right).

On March 12th, TMZ^[11] released the audio recording of the 911 emergency call made by an anonymous caller (shown below).

Death of Andrew Finch

On December 28th, 2017, a competitive match was held in Call of Duty: World War II with a wager of $1.50 set to go to the winner. After the match two players, MiRuHcle and Baperizer began arguing, which escalated to MiRuHcle sending Baperizer his home address, daring the latter to SWAT him. However, the address that was provided was not MiRuHcle's, but instead the address of Andrew Finch, a party that was not involved in the Call of Duty match or the following argument. Following this, Baperizer sent the attached address to known swatter Tyler Raj Barriss, aka SWAutistic, who proceeded to report a fake hostage situation to Wichita police (shown below, left). Wichita police arrived at the home of Finch who, upon investigating the police presence, was fatally shot (shown below, right).

Following the incident several YouTubers, streamers, and members of the gaming community responded on social media,^[14] most notably FaZe ZooMaa, who described how Barriss had sent bomb threats to MLG Dallas earlier that month, as well as sending both ZooMaa and his girlfriend threats that day,^[15]^[16] as well as DramaAlert host Daniel Keem who interviewed Barriss, in which the latter admitted to calling in the hostage threat that led to Finch's death (shown below). The following day Barriss was arrested in Los Angeles.^[17]