Sunday, May 3, 2015

Your Humble Radio Host Becomes A Victim Of "Swatting"

It would appear as though I have made it to the big leagues. Well, not really. But someone has been listening to my radio show and did not like what they were hearing. So they decided to briefly make my life miserable.

While I was on the air doing my broadcast this past Saturday which I do from my home studio, someone called into the local police department claiming to be me, and saying that I had just murdered my entire family. When I got off the air, my home phone rang. The caller ID identified it as the police department. The person on the other end of the line informed me that an incident had been reported at my home. They believed I was being set up, but they asked me to go outside with my hands up. There were several squad cars outside my home. I walked outside with my hands up, was tackled to the ground by the police and handcuffed. The police entered my home, did a search, found nothing. I was immediately uncuffed, and was told I had been the victim of "swatting", where someone calls a false report into the police which sends out the swat team, taking precious resources away from them to handle other real problems.

The detective in charge asked me some questions, told me that it was probably someone who didn't like my radio show, and that a criminal investigation is underway.


Apparently swatting has been around for quite some time. By definition, swatting is the act of tricking an emergency service (via such means as hoaxing a 9-1-1 dispatcher) into dispatching an emergency response based on the false report of an ongoing critical incident. Episodes range from large to small — from the deployment of bomb squads, SWAT units and other police units and the concurrent evacuations of schools and businesses, to a single fabricated police report meant to discredit an individual as a prank or personal vendetta. While it is a misdemeanor or a felony in the U.S. in and of itself to report any untruth to law enforcement, swatting can cause massive disruption to the civil order and the public peace by the hoaxed deployment of police and other civic resources such as ambulances and fire departments. The term derives from SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics), a highly specialized type of police unit. 


Caller ID spoofing, social engineering, TTY, prank calls and phone phreaking techniques may be variously combined. 911 systems (including telephony and human operators) have been tricked by calls placed from cities hundreds of miles away or even from other countries. The caller typically places a 911 call using a spoofed phone number with the goal of tricking emergency authorities into responding to an address with a SWAT team to an emergency that doesn't exist.


It is not just famous people who become victims of these swatting incidents, but many prominent individuals have been subjected to this tactic, including Tom Cruise, Miley Cyrus and Clint Eastwood.
CNN interviewed political commentator Erick Erickson to discuss an incident in which he had been the victim of swatting. A caller to 911 gave Erickson's address as his own and claimed:
I just shot my wife, so.... I don't think I could come down there.... She's dead, now.... I'm looking at her.... I'm going to shoot someone else, soon.
—911 caller
That incident prompted Florida's 24th congressional district Representative Sandy Adams to push for a Justice Department investigation.

I have since learned that these types of incidents occur daily in America, and several innocent people's lives and police departments are disrupted because of it.

In any case, I can now cross off being thrown to the ground and handcuffed from my bucket list.

As an aside, my wife thinks it may be someone local, who knew that they would not be home at the time this went down, because if they had and had answered the phone, the police would have known that the report was false.

2 comments:

  1. I was the victim of swatting back before the term was well known. This was done by members of 4chan.com who do this sort of thing for laughs. It is apparently the cost for being in the internet.

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  2. In my case it was those on the extreme right who came after me.

    ReplyDelete