Teen behind hundreds of swatting attacks pleads guilty to federal charges

Okay so like, genuinely not trying to do a "back in my day" fuckin thing here, but also: what the fuck is wrong with kids? Back when I was coming up, pranking at it's absolute worst was like, filling a dudes shoes with yogurt in the locker room, or like, putting plastic bugs in people's desks n shit. Why the fuck are teenagers trying to get each other murdered by cops!?

I suspect its more about how much national information you're exposed to today than any sort of time based moral failing.

I suspect because now everyone is in front of a camera. It's all become a show.

I cannot be convinced that swatting is something that used to happen. Is there a history of this?

I legit do not remember seeing anything on the evening national news about that in the past, like from before 2000.

I feel like its partly due to our cultural shift for visual media, gags HAVE to be more extreme to get engagement. Back in the day you'd tell the tale to your friends and you could embellish it. Now it's everyone trying to emulate Paul Brother's content to get the reach to FINALLY BECOME AN INFLUENCE. I blame platforms just as much or more than users. Your incentives have driven behavior here.

I finished HS in 2007. I remember equal, if not worse things growing up online. The internet was less moderated back then and there was a lot of communities that celebrated toxic behaviors (like 4chan).

The earliest it could have started is when SS7 links and the internet were bridged by dodgy / nefarious owners of said SS7 links. That started to take off around the mid 90's to spam phones with spoofed numbers. I wanted to get the SS7 links terminated but my boss in the wireless industry, tied heavily to SS7 would not let me because they were paying their bill. It would have been one phone call to terminate many of them.

I suspect you are probably right about the timeline for swatting as shady VoIP providers started getting popular in the early 2000's and started being used for more than just spoofing text advertisements.

To me it feels more like someone wanting control/power over others without being physically capable of bullying.

Fair question, but I would also like to ask "What the f** is wrong with cops?".

Receiving an anonymous call claiming some not-particularly-plausible threat at a particular location probably DOES deserve a police investigation. I see no reason why it impels police to drag people from their house in chains, threaten to shoot them, or actually shoot them.

If police responses were reasonable and proportionate to the plausibility of the threat then swatters would not be able to use them as a weapon.

It became really easy and cheap to use a VPN and VOIP number.

We would order pizzas to one person who complained about our skateboarding.

swatting is older than I am, and kids have been calling in bomb threats to get out of school for the better part of a century

Extremely valid points there.

From: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/crime/swat...

> Prosecutors say the ... teenager advertised his services under the pseudonym Torswats on the encrypted messaging app Telegram, charging as little as $40 to get someone’s gas shut off, $50 for a “major police response”, and $75 for a “bomb threat/mass shooting threat”.

I don't think this is pranks. I had an antisocial stint in my late teens also and it was more about gaining some power over a world that wants to treat you like a cog. I bet it wasn't even about the money (at least it wasn't for me) it's just that having a "hussle" is a persona that you can wear if you want to focus somewhere besides the consequences of your actions.

Swatting and bomb threats are different things. The rise of live steaming also seemed to encourage swatting as you could see the results live.

I guess my friends were weird, but our idea of doing a teenage prank with phone calls was to use our two phone lines (we had 2nd phone lines for our modems) to set up conference calls between each other, and then each of us would call a pizza shop (I might call Domino's, and he'd call Papa John's), and then mute ourselves and laugh while the pizza shop workers would argue about who called who. The smart ones would immediately catch on and say "I think someone is playing a prank on us" and hang up quickly, but the dumb ones would get into an argument with each other.

When Caller ID became the norm, it completely ruined phone pranks like this.

Should be using plainclothes officers to scout out situations prior to sending in swat.

What is the reasonable and proportionate response?

"Swatting" isn't really a thing in Germany, but we've always had other disproportionate responses to single phone calls. One call (or even an email) that threatens to blow up the air port, or some particular air plane, and it's shut down for hours until they've looked in all the places you could hide a serious bomb (presumably, I have no idea what their "okay, I guess it was a hoax" signal is).

But what's the alternative when somebody plausibly describes a situation that indicates someone is in extreme danger? Send out a single cruiser the next day to check out what was up?

*67 could have enabled your shenanigan for years.

9/11 policy panic, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan producing surplus equipment, 400 million privately owned firearms in the US, US history of police standoffs, DoD investment in military PR including Navy Seals worship, and much more have ALL contributed to the Swatting phenomenon.

I don’t think we could have intentionally created an incentive structure for swatting more if we had tried.

And it’s going to continue because guess what was one of the major issues in this election? Domestic security!

I'm pretty sure that the US is unique in it's propensity for SWAT teams to shoot first ask questions later.

Same way as the US is the only nation in the world where it's impossible to prevent weekly school mass shootings.

It’s not all kids, it’s one particularly sociopathic kid and the fact that he suffered no accountability until now.

There's also the super weird (to people outside the US) insistence that the only possible response to gun violence (by gangsters, school kids, or cops) is "thoughts and prayers".

What happens in Germany when someone plausibly describes a situation that indicates someone is in extreme danger? Over here (in Greece), police officers will knock on your door, say they had a report and need to check, and then walk in and look around.

I've heard of reports of domestic violence, child molestation, things like that, and it's always the same. They rush to the place, knock on the door, look around, and arrest the people they need to arrest. What they don't do is start shooting.

Not sure about your neighbors but if I get a random pizza delivery I would just pay for it and eat it. :)

Pulling the fire alarm, too. Given how many times this happened at my high school, I'm sure that at least one person in the US has died because first responders were at a false alarm rather than available to help them.

Regarding "no accountability", it seems 'wrong' that the response to the calls must be immediate, but it seems to have taken at least a little while to identify where the calls were made from / who made the calls. They started some time in 2022.

That level of asynchrony is not how the system should work.

(Admittedly "should" does a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence).

Constitutional amendments are basically impossible in the US. A congress member shot at a congressional event won't even vote change the second amendment (Scalise).

Even conservatives know the only hope is stacking the supreme court.

Yeah, as much as swatting is shitty behavior, I think kids behaving egregiously is a lot more understandable than adults whose job is ostensibly the protection of everyone.

It still works, as evidenced by the very active prank calls my neighbor's son plays on my wife and I.

He is very sweet and sheltered, so it's a good outlet. He literally tried the Prince Albert in a can one. That hasn't been relevant for like what, 50 years?

None of what you mentioned backs up the idea that swatting used to exist in the past as it does now.

By the time Caller ID became ubiquitous, we were past the time when we found that prank really funny.

Also, *67 also caused a lot of people to simply not answer calls that were blocked this way.

The solution is obvious, but we unfortunately continue to choose not to do it.

Bullshit. You just didn't hear about the kids like this from your generation.

Maybe not swatting, but bomb threats were probably the equivalent. My junior high had at least 2 that I can remember where we were all cleared out for hours as the school was searched. Swatting had the internet to fuel it's rise, local news programs didn't use things like reporting on every fake bomb threat to generate views or "engagement" and in turn did not spread the idea to a massive amount of people. But they still happened, quite a bit. Like many things fueled from the internet it rewards the more extremes, bomb threats are childs play now--but at one time they weren't

Swatting is something new (popularized by the Internet, made possible by military surpluss gear sold police wanting to larp in tacticool shit) but stupid pranks with deadly consequences are not.

Yeah, it seems like they take the seriousness of the threat into account when determining the response, but not the plausibility of the threat.

If there's a 1% chance that the house contains a deranged gunman threatening to shoot his family and then himself, that probably shouldn't be met with the same response as a 30% chance of the same... There are probably a lot of situations where it's a tough call though.

What if in the call they claim the suspect is armed and threatening to start shooting hostages if the police show up? Do they still just knock on the door?

What if in the call they claim the suspect has a nuclear bomb and is threatening to blow up the city? It's kind of a similar scenario, given that I can't remember either of these ever happening. People here don't tend to have guns.

People in the US "don't tend to" take hostages and threaten to shoot them either. "Don't tend to" isn't the same as "it never happens".

I'm probably your age, kids back in my day would kill or injure other kids for being gay or Black. I think a lot of bullying has actually gone down, but because of the internet one sociopathic kid can fuck over people at scale.

Yeah, this never happens here. Even if it did happen once a decade, it wouldn't be a valid reason to worry about once a week, and it wouldn't be a single anonymous person calling in a tip that someone is threatening to shoot hostages.

Yeah wtf is wrong with cops being on edge when they think they're responding to a mass shooting. How dare they!

Future headline: Police ignore mass shooting because they thought it was a prank

'there's no way to stop this' says the government of the only country where this happens regularly.

source: the onion [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_...

I don't think they're trying to get anyone murdered by cops.

I think they're really fucking stupid. I think they think that since they are making up claims that everything will be alright. Like the cops are going to bust in, see that there's no drugs/hostages/satanic rituals/whatever, say "My bad", and fuck off.

But there's always the chance that things go horribly wrong. And that chance is actually pretty high.

You only linked the image.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_...

The cops are reflective of the system that they operate in. Same as everyone else. Change the system, change behavior.

I don't know when your day was, but back in my day (in the 90s) we had to evacuate the high school at least once a quarter for bomb threats. We wouldn't go back in until the FD cleared it.

(There was never a bomb.)

Whatever is wrong with kids these days is nothing new.

Oh, that could be quite likely, copy cat crimes are a thing after all. I simply mean that people weren't harmlessly interacting before that is all, swatting didn't supplant relatively harmless pranks.

What do you propose? Have you wondered why police here act as they do? Could it be all of the guns, gangs, mass shootings, and crime? We ain't like Europe in this regard.

I didn't do a great job segueing from the parent. I agree with the parent, and my comment expands on why its happening now when it wasn't happening, at least to the same degree, in the past.