Swatting Is Not a Prank, It’s Much Worse

When online harassment breaks into the real world

Pranks, on the most basic level, are fundamental to how we interact with others. They can break tension, release stress and promote playful competition. But we must always remember the old saying, “It’s all fun and games until someone shits their pants.”

Some forms of pranking have, over the last few years, turned sadistic. A recently publicized, and strangely academized, iteration of this is the infamous act of “swatting.”

For those unfamiliar, you may just consider yourself better off remaining in the dark. For the morbidly curious or the already informed, a quick definition: swatting is the act of calling in a fake bomb threat on someone for the purposes of one’s amusement and another’s terror.

As media spokesperson for the Vancouver Police Department, Constable Brian Montague explains, swatting is, “basically making a fake call that drives the police to a house or a business. A call that’s made by a suspect that would require us to resource it heavily—sending the Emergency Response Team members, dog team members for larger patrol/detention, plain clothes officers … and we’d be talking a serious offence with the mention of weapons, hostages or shots being fired.”

Immediately a sane person can find a host of distinctions that removes “swatting” from the general list of acceptable pranks. There’s nothing about sending pizzas to someone’s house that compares to tricking an emergency service dispatcher into deploying armed operatives at an unsuspecting victim’s home.

In comparison to traditional pranks, the cost of swatting is much higher for everyone involved. “It’s obviously very traumatizing for the victims, it’s extremely draining on resources for the police, and for the suspect you run the risk of going to jail,” says Montague. Every time a false report is made, the police force has to divert officers and energy away from people that are truly in distress.

And then there’s the people who get swatted. As it stands right now, the VPD manages a victim services unit providing victims of swatting with the ability to pursue financial remuneration from the perpetrators of the crime. Currently, those convicted of “swatting” someone can be charged criminally under public mischief—a Canadian criminal code offence—which essentially amounts to providing a false report to the police.

“There’s no expert in the field of swatting and we don’t generally talk about it,” says Montague. “It’s kind of like how we don’t talk a lot about people who phone in bomb threats. These are attention seekers, and the less attention they get the fewer the incidents we see.”

Because it still happens only sparingly, there’s no identifiable demographic committing this crime. However,  some of the more infamous incidents have been perpetrated by youth, including a “B.C. teenager” who copped to 23 charges of harassment, extortion and public mischief as it pertains to swatting just last summer.

“You have to deal with them as if they are real, there’s no way to determine whether the call is fake at the beginning,” explains Montague. “Once we’ve determined the call is false, we look into determining where that call came from and identifying the individual that made that call. But it can be challenging at times.”

Videos of swatting incidents are plastered over YouTube, some depicting bemused gamers on the receiving end of—what is to them—a well deployed pranks, and others showing real life trauma inflicted upon the unsuspecting. Committing a crime like swatting involves a layer of indifference on the part of the perpetrator that reflects other forms of internet harassment. The best we can do to combat things like this is to learn about them in the hopes that we can help raise awareness and take away their power.