Teen Pleads Guity to 23 Charges, Including Harassment and Swatting
posted Sunday May 24, 2015 by Scott Ertz
There is a terrible trend happening in the online gaming world called Swatting. In case you have not heard of this practice, it involves one person finding the home information of another and calling in a fake emergency call. Usually the caller claims to be within the house of the victim (the other person) and is either holding the family hostage or that they have killed everyone in the house. Because of this call, the local SWAT team shows up and kicks down the door, often barging in on a Twitch broadcast.
Obviously this is a terribly dangerous "prank" that should be taken very seriously. Luckily, law enforcement has begun to take this seriously. Earlier this year there was an arrest in Las Vegas in response to a well-publicized incident in July of last year. What it revealed was that these are not isolated incidents. In fact, the 19-year-old who was arrested had been involved in several incidents.
This week, a 17-year-old on trial in Canada pleaded guilty to 23 counts including several counts of swatting. While in most cases these "pranks" revolve around online videogame rivalries, this one turns out to have started even more ridiculously. The teenager met a girl from Florida online and began an online relationship. The problem is that the girl didn't know that this was what he thought was happening and rejected his reality. As a result he called in two threats to her school and one to her home.
These are not his only incidents, however. It turns out that, in more traditional fashion, he did look for further victims using League of Legends and Twitter. He apparently got sloppy with the later incidents, as they were done while part of an 8-hour YouTube Live broadcast in which he pulled this "prank" more than once. It also ended up being what got him arrested when enough viewers of the stream called the police.
Because of this very stupid decision, it is likely that a large portion of his young adult life will be lost to jail time when his sentencing, which takes place on June 29th, is complete. It is important, like in the Vegas case, that an example be made to try and prevent future incidents where someone could really get hurt.
