An employee watches a computer screen displaying the video game "Glorious Mission Online" at the game developer's office in Shanghai August 2, 2013.ALY SONG/Reuters
There were roughly 60,000 people watching when police stormed Joshua Peters's house in St. Cloud, Minn.
The 27-year-old, who makes a living playing video games and broadcasting his exploits online, was in the middle of a live broadcast when heavily armed officers arrived at his door. Among the thousands of people watching Mr. Peters, someone had decided to pull a prank. Using anonymity software to hide their location, they called 911 and reported a shooting at Mr. Peters's address.
It didn't take long for the police to realize it was a hoax. When he returned to the camera, Mr. Peters was in tears. "I had police point a gun at my little brothers because of you," he said to his audience. "They could have been shot – they could have died – because you chose to swat my stream."
In recent months, the phenomenon called "swatting" appears to have morphed from a rare prank into something far more common. Whereas, a generation ago, the person responsible for a prank pizza delivery could easily be found by tracing phone numbers, modern day anonymity tools make it difficult to catch those responsible.
Swatting has been around, in one form or another, for years. However, its recent explosion in popularity is at least partly due to its new-found use as a tool of intimidation in the so-called GamerGate movement.
Supporters of the movement claim it is chiefly concerned with exposing ethical lapses in video-game journalism, but the movement has become notorious for widespread intimidation and harassment of its critics, especially female ones. (There is also evidence that swatting is spreading beyond the movement. In the case of Mr. Peters, for example, the motive for the stunt is still unclear.)
One of the more common methods of harassment – and the one from which swatting appears to have originated – is "doxxing." In effect, doxxing involves unearthing a victim's personal information (most commonly their home address and phone number) and publishing it on the Web. Numerous GamerGate critics have been the subject of doxxing in the past year, and some have also been swatted.
In early January, a caller told a 911 dispatcher that he was holding hostages in southwest Portland. The address he gave used to belong to Grace Lynn, an artist and video-game creator who used to be part of the GamerGate movement until she publicly turned on it, calling it misogynistic. The caller didn't know that Ms. Lynn had moved to California.
Police are having to figure out how to deal with the increase in incidents of swatting.
"There's a misunderstanding that people who make this sort of call make – that just because they claim there's hostages being shot, we're just going to be taking down the door," says Pete Simpson, a spokesman for the Portland Police Department. "That just doesn't happen. We will attempt phone calls, we will make efforts to verify that information."
However, just because a SWAT team isn't always called out, the impact can still be dramatic and disruptive. In the case of Ms. Lynn, Portland police sent almost two dozen officers to the victim's old address. The officers were in the middle of planning how to approach the residence when Ms. Lynn called the police to let them know about the hoax. She had found out about it after coming across a page on the popular chat forum 8chan in which various users talked about their plans to swat her.
"We still have to take these calls seriously," Mr. Simpson says. "And we have to put a lot of effort into disproving them."
In recent months, there have been positive developments in the effort to combat swatting. A number of online groups have taken it upon themselves to try to discover the identity of the most prolific swatters. But, like many such efforts, the success rate is, at best, mixed. Others have petitioned for swatters to be charged with attempted murder, an effort that's extremely unlikely to succeed, but reflects a growing concern with the practice.
Last month, police in Las Vegas arrested 19-year-old Brandon Wilson on charges of identity theft and intimidation, among other crimes. Mr. Wilson, who goes by the online handle "Famed God," is alleged to be responsible for several swatting incidents around the country, including a reported murder that turned out to be a hoax.
But such victories appear to be the exception. Thanks to easily available and cheap anonymity software, police are often unable to track down the person responsible for the call (and since much of that software also has legitimate uses, such as helping activists in repressive countries stay safe, it is difficult to criminalize it or ban it outright). And even if swatters are located, jurisdictional issues can make the borderless crime impossible to prosecute.
"It's really challenging, because the person can be in another state completely, where jurisdiction doesn't apply," Mr. Simpson says. "And if they are out of the country, we have a real problem."