Advances in technology allow prank callers to mask their voice, phone number or IP address, or make their false 911 calls sound more credible.
Author Patrick Tomlinson and his wife, business owner Niki Robinson, have been "swatted" at their home in Milwaukee more than 40 times, often resulting in police pointing guns at their heads. Their tormentors have also called in false bomb threats to venues using their names in three states. Yet law enforcement hasn’t been able to stop the prank calls.
The couple’s terror comes as these incidents appear to be on the rise in the U.S., at least on college campuses. In less than a single week in April, universities including Clemson, Florida, Boston, Harvard, Cornell, Pittsburgh, Rutgers and Oklahoma, as well as Middlebury College, were targeted by swatters.
To combat the growing problem, the FBI has begun taking formal measures to get a comprehensive picture of the problem on a national level.
Isn't FBI too high level to prevent swatting? Seems like if the local police are getting sent out, any solution would have to happen at that level instead.
Like if the local PD couldn't figure it out with 43 reported swattings on the couple mentioned in the story, how is a national database going to help?
Any one, from any where in the world, can do it.
Between VPNs and VOIP phones, it’d almost impossible to sort out whose legitimate and whose not without showing up.
As a short term fix, people who are frequently swatted, usually coordinate with the local/responding cops so that if there’s a call at their adress, they call first before breaking down doors
As a shorter term fix, not murdering people based on a simple phone call would also fix the problem.
Yeah this was my thought as well.
The problem here is pigs murdering people without evidence.
I'm not confident the FBI is going to solve that problem.
Being "scared" is all they need to commit murder...