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The FBI describes “swatting” as a prank designed to draw an emergency law enforcement response to a hoax victim, often creating a situation where a Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team ...
Here's what you need to know about swatting and hoax threats after four current and former Ohio officials were the latest victims of the crime.
The ADL estimates there were over 1,000 swatting incidents in 2019, but the true figure is unclear as there is no federal statute against swatting that would enable convictions to be recorded.
The swatting was organized in an attempt to force him to give up his Twitter handle "@tennessee". Shane Sonderman was sentenced to five years in prison for the swatting, and ordered to pay a $250,000 fine. A 16-year-old in the United Kingdom was also involved, but they could not be extradited or identified due to their age as a juvenile. [51] [52]
Swatting is a criminal harassment tactic that involves false reporting in order to generate a police response to another person's address. Information in the hoaxes is often obtained through data broker websites, compromised accounts, and leaked databases to obtain, often through legal means, personally identifying information about the individual which can be used for swatting.
The FBI described swatting as a new phenomenon in 2008, just a few years before I was a victim of it. It’s been in the headlines recently because of a spate of incidents involving public officials .
At the time of the incident, Shane Sonderman was a 20-year-old resident of Lauderdale County, Tennessee.Sonderman had been a part of a group of people on the instant messaging platform Discord that was responsible for carrying out multiple other swatting and extortion attacks on people with usernames on platforms considered valuable.
A spate of false reports of shootings at the homes of public officials in recent days could be setting the stage for stricter penalties against so-called swatting in more states. U.S. Sen. Rick ...