“People learn of those threats, and it spreads,” said Gregory H. Winger, an assistant professor focusing on cybersecurity at the University of Cincinnati’s School of International and Public Affairs.
In Greene’s case, a man in New York called a Georgia suicide hotline and falsely claimed that he had shot his girlfriend at Greene’s address. Following that episode on Christmas Day, several other lawmakers in Georgia and around the country were similarly targeted.
About an hour after Greene’s social media post, former Nebraska state senator Adam Morfeld wrote on X, “Merry Christmas to all, except for the jerk who called 911 pretending to be me claiming I was going to kill myself.”
Representative Brandon Williams also announced that day on social media that “our home was swatted this afternoon.”
The day after Christmas, “numerous” sheriff’s deputies responded to the home of Ohio state Representative Kevin D. Miller “on a false report of a shooting,” he wrote on X. The event “put several lives at risk and was a huge waste of resources”.
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Several state senators in Georgia have also been targeted this week, prompting calls for state legislation to strengthen laws against swatting. Among those targeted was state Senator Clint Dixon. He was watching football with his wife on Christmas night at his Buford home when police arrived in response to a caller who said he had killed his wife and was holding someone else hostage, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
When a member of Congress is targeted by a swatting call, the US Capitol Police seeks to “work closely with our local and federal law enforcement partners,” the agency said in a statement. “To protect ongoing investigations and to minimise the risk of copy-cats, we cannot provide more details at this time.”
Swatting has been employed as an intimidation tactic for more than 15 years. In early 2008, the FBI’s website warned of the “new phenomenon of ‘Swatting,’” calling it a “much more serious twist” on the old crime of hacking into phone companies to make long-distance calls. Since then, the problem has grown in frequency and severity.
In 2017, police in Wichita fatally shot a 28-year-old man who opened the front door of the home they had been summoned to by a phony call about a hostage situation.
In 2020, a 60-year-old man in Tennessee died of a heart attack after armed police surrounded his home while responding to a false report that someone had been shot at that address.
Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer of NY.Credit: AP
In April, US Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer called on the FBI to investigate dozens of swatting episodes aimed at schools.
In October, The Washington Post reported that over the past year, more than 500 schools in the United States had been subjected to a coordinated swatting effort, based on a review of media reports and dozens of public records requests.
One widely cited figure comes from Kevin Kolbye, a former FBI swatting expert, who told the Economist that he estimated the number of swatting episodes went from about 400 in 2011 to more than 1000 in 2019.
In the past two decades, there have probably been 20,000 swatting episodes, according Shapiro, the professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and author of the book Cyberpredators and Their Prey. It “has been a problem for a while.”
The problem has grown as law enforcement personnel have been responding to an increasing number of mass shootings and domestic threats, according to Winger, who said swatters found a way to “weaponise police responses”.
The increased public safety challenges posed by active shooters and other assailants, plus fake calls for emergency responses, “are two sides of the same coin,” Winger said. “How do you know whether that is a real situation or somebody being swatted, because the phone call you get is often quite similar.”
Shapiro said legislation to combat swatting and train personnel how to monitor and identify it has been hindered in Congress for years.
One reason for the delay is that lawmakers who support such legislation can become victims of it, Shapiro said.
Washington Post
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