The news claims there’s a new scam or prank amongst gamers to “SWAT” by faking a call to 911 (and masking their ALI/ANI info) to claim their gaming opponent just killed their mom, or whatever? Allegedly, a SWAT team will show up on the opponent’s doorstep?
Seriously? This whole thing seems like a UL. ALI info is a database that automatically provides your location, and ANI is a database that automatically provides your number. I think you’d have to go to great lengths to scam the ALI/ANI system. What’s the SD?
No, the article itself notes that SWATing is a real thing in the opening paragraph, what it’s debunking is that a kid got a long prison sentence for “domestic terrorism” for doing it, which was a story created by a satirical news site.
It’s been around for over a decade. It was a typical trick of the “Anonymous” type of internet trouble-makers/activists and hacker types.
VoIP technology, among other things, makes it very easy to spoof phone numbers on caller ID. the phone systems have been cracking down recently, but essentially when Caller ID was developed, like email when it was developed, it was not anticipated that the people who might want to mess with it would also have the technical control to do so.
This guy claims it first happened in 2005, but I suspect it was not really the first:
It’s a more lively variation of the tricks my high school classmates used to pull, to have 20 different pizzas delivered at once to the vice-principal’s house one night.
the book “Criminology” by Larry Seigel, I see in Google Books, says more that between 2002 and 2005, in 60 US cities more than 100 victims wer 'swatted".