It’s happening all too frequently, and it’s happening all across the nation. It’s called “swatting” and it occurs when people make phony calls to emergency lines claiming issues such as hostage situations, so that SWAT teams will respond to a person’s home.
These are exceptionally dangerous practices, and police area afraid to even acknowledge them in the fears that others will discover a practice they’d never considered, and attempt to practice it themselves. However, they know that it is important for the community to be informed of potential dangerous situations and breaches of security.
It is also dangerous because fooling 911 emergency systems is very easy to do. An entire underground practice that is growing around making spoofed 911 calls using Internet telephony, phone cards, and other forms of Caller ID spoofing that callers can use to appear to be calling from any number that they desire.
This being said, it means that the prankster can actually be calling from anywhere across the country, claiming to be making a local call. Caller ID spoofing has made it possible to appear in one place, when the caller is not there at all.
These pranks are putting lives in danger in cities and towns across the nation. Not only is it dangerous for the people whose homes are raided by the SWAT teams, but it also ties up vital emergency resources – the 911 operators, the SWAT teams, and all of the other health and emergency individuals who are put on alert as soon as this kind of call is made – making victims out of people suffering real emergencies at the same time, who are in legitimate need of the emergency resources being tied up by the pranksters. Not to mention the fact that shots have been fired toward perfectly innocent individuals, because of hoaxes claiming that these people have hostages inside their homes.
Furthermore, swatters don’t seem to be one-time offenders. They make dozens of calls, leading to hundreds of victims over the span of only a few months at a time.
Fortunately, extensive efforts are taken to track down and prosecute these individuals. It is taking fewer and fewer calls for swatters to be captured and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. As this is a relatively new crime, and the ability to capture these pranksters is only just beginning, the legal system is making an example of those captured, and maximizing their sentences as much as possible.