By Brenda Flanagan
Correspondent
As Digital Press Video Games hosted a gamers club meeting here in Clifton Saturday night, police and SWAT teams suddenly rolled up out of the night — reporting someone had called in a hostage situation.
“One by one we came out with our hands up. There were cops with shields, a SWAT team and machines guns. They did pat downs, zip-tied the handcuffs,” said Stephanie McKeon.
“When you immediately arrive, you don’t realize it’s a swatting incident until — as the scene plays out — you start to understand things don’t make sense,” said Detective Lt. George Rosenthal from the Passaic County Sheriff’s Office, Special Investigations Division. When asked when law enforcement realizes the situation is a hoax, he said, “When you start to encounter the victims — the people who were targeted — you realize they’re really confused.”
Rosenthal says initial confusion quickly settled into annoyance, as gamers realized they’d been fingered by some prankster using Rosenthal’s SWAT team as an unwitting vehicle in a hoax called swatting: calling in a bogus threat to mobilize police, who target unsuspecting victims.
Colorado gamer Jordan Mathewson got swatted while live-streaming.
Officers rushed in to bust Mathewson who looked bemused.
“These kind of swatting events are targeted at people who are streaming the game and have their webcam up so that they’re visible to these people and all these people want to do is have their fun with this police-calling swatting business,” Mathewson said.
Mathewson allegedly got swatted by a rival gamer. Nobody got hurt. Rosenthal says every time the SWAT team mobilizes, it calls in off-duty officers and pulls out the armored vehicle. That can cost thousands and it’s risky. But police have no choice except to go in full throttle.
Last September, a Millville swatter told 9-1-1 operators he’d killed somebody. It wasn’t true, but, “If we’re going into situation where there’s a threat, we’re no good if we getting hurt on the way in and can’t get victims out,” said Rosenthal.
Under New Jersey statutes, swatting’s just a third degree offense and perpetrators are hard to trace. But even if no one is physically harmed, people can be terrified. When swatters targeted another gamer, police brandishing guns crashed into his home and found his little brother.
“He’s 10 years old and he had 10 police officers pointing a gun at him, because he was at the door,” said the gamer.
Nobody’s really keeping a database on swatting, although authorities report anecdotally the number of cases is on the rise and that they’re concerned it’ll still be viewed as a prank or game until the public consciousness is shocked by a case with deadly consequences.