Crime & Safety

Prank Caller Reports Home Being Overrun With Gunmen

Troy police say the false report is part of a new "swatting" joke that appears to be going around the country.

An online argument between two friends playing a video game had police in Troy police responding to what they believed was a life-threatening situation.

Police Lt. Robert Redmond said emergency dispatchers received a 911 call about 4:50 p.m. Friday from an AT&T service for hearing-impaired people from someone claiming to be a 16-year-old Troy resident. The caller stated he was in a closet and hiding from four men with weapons inside the house in the 1000 block of North Lake Drive.

Redmond said all available officers responded to the call after the caller said shots were being fired.

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Officers first arriving to the scene observed a woman and teen boy walking out of the home and entering a vehicle in the driveway. Police said the two were ordered out of the vehicle when the teen began yelling, "swatting – swatting, it's a prank."

Redmond said "swat" or "swatting" refers to using a computer program to make a call to 911 that allows the user to change the telephone number they are calling from to another number in order to make a false report that will draw a large response from police.

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"Apparently, it's going on around the country," Redmond said.

This is the first occurance of "swatting" he's aware of in Troy, Redmond said.

In this instance, the teen told police he had been playing an online game with a friend he believes lives in Boston. The friend told the Troy teen he was going to "swat" him.

"The kid knew it was coming, but he was too afraid to say anything to his parents," Redmond said.

Police said neither the AT&T operator nor the 911 operator were able to tell the phone call was coming from a different number than what appeared in their system. Additionally, the number received by 911 showed it was coming from the Troy teen's home, not Boston.

In 2008, three men were sentenced to 60 months in federal prison for a swatting conspiracy that involved more than 250 victims, up to $250,000 in losses and disruption of services for telecommunications providers and emergency responders. Two of the men, Jason Trowbridge and Chad Ward, were from California, while another defendant in the federal case, Stuart "Michael Knight" Rosoff, is from Cleveland.

Federal District Court Judge Jane J. Boyle said at the men's sentencing in Dallas that "federal statutes didn't provide a long enough sentence to punish the egregious conduct" the men engaged in and suffering caused to their victims, according to a U.S. Department of Justice news release.

Another man, Guadalupe Santana Martinez, pleaded guilty to his role in the conspiracy and was sentenced to 30 months in prison. Federal prosecutors said in a news release that at least two people were injured as a result of Martinez's calls, which included two where he identified himself as a family member of one of the swat victims and told authorities he shot and killed members of the family, that he was holding hostages and he was using hallucinogenic drugs, and he was armed with an AK47. He demanded $50,000 and transportation across the U.S. border into Mexico and threatened to kill the remaining hostages if his demands weren't met.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation said swatting is a more serious twist of the old "phone phreakers" crime that was popular among techies in the 1970s, who hacked phone companies to make free long-distance calls. However, the FBI said, the new prank places the community in danger as responders rush to the scene, taking them away from real emergencies. 

"It's highly detrimental to us to have this happen," Redmond said, adding that such phony calls have the possibility of place unsuspecting individuals in harm's way, in addition to wasting valuable resources.

"We will track him down," he said of the recent prank caller.

Investigators confiscated the teen's Xbox game so it can be searched for evidence leading to the identification of the caller.

"Parents need to know if they hear their kids talking about 'swatting' someone, that's what it means," Redmond said. "That's not what it meant when I was a kid."


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