The meaning of swatting

[Little_Nemo]

I know, it’s hitting a fly.

But suppose we go with the current slang usage. I’ve always felt that swatting somebody meant you contacted the police and falsely identified your target as a dangerous criminal in an attempt to provoke the police to show up at their location and forcibly arrest them.

However, I’ve encountered two usages this week which were subtly different. In both cases the speaker used swatting to describe a situation where somebody called the police and falsely reported a crime was in progress (in once case a bomb threat and in the other a mass shooting). In neither case was a specific individual the target of the false report.

So which is it? Does swatting just mean reporting a false crime to rile up the police? Or does swatting mean some specific person is being targeted with a false accusation?

[DCnDC]

It’s always been my understanding that its meaning is that of using the police as a weapon against a specific target, rather than the police being the intended victim.

[Heracles]

I think it’s the latter (crime in progress). AFAIK the name comes from SWAT teams, which are deployed for major criminal events (kidnapping, hostage crisis). It’s not just a police car showing up, it’s the full-blown armored trucks and megaphones and bulletproof vests thing. It’s mostly meant to disturb/annoy the target, but apparently people have been killed when coming out of their house to ask why they were suddenly under siege.

[hogarth]

@Little_Nemo

In both cases the speaker used swatting to describe a situation where somebody called the police and falsely reported a crime was in progress (in once case a bomb threat and in the other a mass shooting). In neither case was a specific individual the target of the false report.

If the speaker is claiming that Mr. X called in a bomb threat on a specific location but Mr. X didn’t have any particular animosity to the people working at that location, I would be skeptical. On the other hand, if Mr. X did have animosity towards that location, then I would consider it to fall under the vague heading of “swatting”, I guess.

[BigT]

I’ve not heard it used to mean falsely reporting a crime to rile up the police. But it would make sense to me to use even if there was no specific individual targeted. I don’t see why you couldn’t swat a school or a business or a neighborhood or similar.

[Jegpeg]

posted in error (and can’t find delete)

[Banquet_Bear]

…the wiki page description is perfectly cromulent with my understanding of the word.

Swatting is a criminal harassment tactic of deceiving an emergency service (via such means as hoaxing an emergency services dispatcher) into sending a police or emergency service response team to another person’s address. This is triggered by false reporting of a serious law enforcement emergency, such as a bomb threat, murder, hostage situation, or a false report of a mental health emergency, such as reporting that a person is allegedly suicidal or homicidal and may or may not be armed, among other things.

Swatting

I don’t think a specific person is required. Just that the police are lead to believe that a dangerous criminal action is taking place that would require an armed response.

[penultima_thule]

They are homonyms but swotting, not uncommonly spelled in error as swatting, is studying intensely a subject especially for an examination.

Being an Australia, swatting flies is something of a national pastime.

[nearwildheaven]

Several high schools in my area were indeed swatted a few weeks ago, and you can guess what law enforcement was told (that a shooting was going on). The calls didn’t originate in this region, either. IDK if the culprits were ever caught.

[Chronos]

@penultima_thule

They are homonyms but swotting, not uncommonly spelled in error as swatting, is studying intensely a subject especially for an examination.

That sounds like what Americans call “cramming”

[penultima_thule]

@Chronos

That sounds like what Americans call “cramming”

Yes, I reckon they’d be interchangeable terms.

[Moriarty]

@nearwildheaven

Several high schools in my area were indeed swatted a few weeks ago, and you can guess what law enforcement was told (that a shooting was going on). The calls didn’t originate in this region, either. IDK if the culprits were ever caught.

I recently heard a news story about swatting calls that were targeting schools, and the police believed that the calls were originating in Africa.

What made it so pernicious was that local people didn’t believe the police when they went through the schools (multiple times) and announced that nobody had been hurt. They were insisting that it was a coverup, and casualties were inside.

'Most of these calls are coming from overseas,' national expert says on...

‘The Uvalde effect’: Parents rushing to schools amid rash of bogus threats,...

[Little_Nemo]

Why would there be people in Africa calling in fake emergencies in America?

You have to wonder if these calls genuinely originate in Africa (which seems improbable) or if they’re just be routed through Africa to cover up the trail.

[steronz]

Swatting as a term didn’t exist until Twitch streamers, as far as I know. Bomb threats are decades older. I guess I can’t be the word police but I don’t think they should be synonyms.

[Moriarty]

@Little_Nemo

have to wonder if these calls genuinely originate in Africa (which seems improbable) or if they’re just be routed through Africa to cover up the trail.

Here’s what I had previously heard

An investigation and report by the sheriff’s office, obtained by NPR through an open records request, found that the call came from an internet, or VOIP, phone number. It also found that the VOIP account was tied to IP addresses in Ethiopia owned by the AFRINIC network, and specifically to the Ethiopian state-owned phone and internet service called Ethio Telecom, based in Addis Ababa. On the day that Bossier Parish received a call from this number, so, too, had 79 other places across Louisiana, Arizona and New Mexico…

To Mack, the evidence that the caller was operating out of Ethiopia was clear.

The IP addresses tied to both the TextNow activity, as well as the caller’s Gmail account, were all based in that country. She and other experts said it doesn’t appear that the caller was using a Virtual Private Network, or VPN, to disguise their location. For instance, Mack noted that on the day her office received the false bomb alert, the caller stayed on the same IP address through hundreds of calls they made over several hours.

Although there does remain the possibility that it’s actually originating from a more hostile location, like Russia.

…it’s possible the caller hacked or found other means to access digital infrastructure in Ethiopia, in order to route their calls through the compromised network.

“I did find a fair amount of compromised Ethio Telecom IPs that are out there on various markets like Genesis and Russian Market,” said Keven Hendricks, referring to two online marketplaces on the so-called darknet, where illicit goods and services tend to be sold.

I don’t know why they’d do it, however.

In all this, the motive itself remains a mystery.

“I don’t know. [Maybe it’s] some type of what they think is an assault on the American way of life,” Mack said. “Especially disrupting schools, scaring parents and teachers and children. So I don’t know if that is what their gain is, just to cause that chaos.”

Those fake active shooter calls to schools? A similar thing happened before