Swatting

Swatting is the act of deceiving an emergency service (via such means as hoaxing an emergency services dispatcher) into sending a police and 9-1-1 response team to another person's address, based on the false reporting of a serious law enforcement emergency, such as a bomb threat, murder, hostage-taking or other alleged incident. The term derives from SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics), a specialized type of police unit in the United States and many other countries carrying military-style equipment such as door breaching weapons, submachine guns and assault rifles.

Swatting has been associated with online harassment campaigns, and episodes ranging from small events to large incidents, from a single fabricated police report meant to discredit an individual as a prank or personal vendetta to the deployment of bomb squads, heavily-armed SWAT units and other police units and the concurrent evacuations of schools and businesses.

Swatting has been described as terrorism due to its potential to cause disruption, wasting resources and time of emergency services, divert attention from real emergencies and possibly cause a risk of injuries and psychological harm to the persons targeted and for the first responders. It also causes money and tax dollars to be wasted by the city or county when responding to a false report of a serious law enforcement emergency. Swatting is linked to the action of doxxing, which is obtaining and broadcasting, often via the Internet, the address and details of an individual with an intent to harass or endanger them. Making false reports to emergency services is punishable by prison sentences in the U.S. and is a crime in many other countries.

Swatting has origins in prank calls to emergency services. Over the years, callers used increasingly sophisticated techniques to direct response units of particular types. In particular, attempts to have SWAT teams be dispatched to particular locations spawned the term 'swatting'. The term was used by the FBI as far back as 2008.

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