'Swatting' phone crime trend causing fear and frustration

By Erika Norton
Middletown — A new crime trend is terrifying parents and students and frustrating administrators and law enforcement agencies across the country.
“Swatting,” which started within the online gaming community, is a 21st-century phenomenon that takes the prank phone call to a new level. The term refers to the act of phoning 911 to report a fake threat, in an attempt to prompt the dispatch of an emergency response team to an unsuspecting resident’s home, a business, or in many cases, a school.
The term takes its name from Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) police units.
These attacks are causing headaches and costing schools instructional time and money, especially in the Middletown City School District, which has reported 13 incidents of swatting during this school year alone and the largest number of incidents of any school district in the country.
“It is a huge cost in so many different ways,” said Town of Wallkill Supervisor Dan Depew. “There are swatting attempts that happen, but never to this severity. A school district having one or two every three years would be normal. This is unprecedented.”
According to the FBI, approximately 400 swatting incidents occur every year nationwide, and while some culprits are caught, in many cases, the callers are extremely hard to track down.

In some instances, the caller’s number is blocked, but in some of the cases at Middletown schools, the calls were done through “caller ID spoofing” — a type of digital scam used to disguise the origin of incoming calls by transmitting phony information to the targeted phone’s caller ID display screen.
Only one person has been arrested in connection with the Middletown swatting hoaxes - a nine-year-old girl from Middletown, according to Depew. However, police believe this was an isolated, copycat phone threat.
As for the nature of the threats, the ones that have been phoned in to the Middletown schools vary from phony reports of active shooters to “I’m in the building with a gun” to “I have a bomb,” Depew said. These false threats, many of which have come into the Middletown’s Maple Hill Elementary School, are not only terrorizing students, but wasting the schools’ and law enforcement agencies’ time and money.
“When I have detectives going out to walk through the school to look for a bomb that, thank God, is not in that building, they can’t be working on a rape case or a murder case or something else that they might have been working on at that time,” Depew explained. “These swatting cases seem to leapfrog everything else we’re doing and … it’s very difficult to put a value on all that.”
On top of having to shut down the school while agencies investigate, the Middletown School District has also had to purchase a state-of-the-art phone data system, Depew said. The district’s IT department has had to focus a lot of time and energy to help combat this problem, time they could’ve been using in other areas, he explained.
Other recent instances of swatting have occurred in western Pennsylvania and areas of north New Jersey, including a widespread attack on June 8 of last year that affected eight New Jersey schools and the Robert Wood Johnson Hospital in New Brunswick. The high school in West Milford, N.J., was one of the schools that was swatted, according to Superintendent Anthony Riscica.
After the school was locked down, searched, and determined to be safe, the police investigated further to try and track down the caller, according to Riscica. The district shared whatever information came in, and the investigators tried to determine the call’s origin, but they were not able to identify the caller.
“(In) their research of trying to find out where the call came from, they found out that it was indeed one of these robocall swatting things that they could not track back to anybody,” he said.
Riscica also expressed a need for a solution for schools.
“I hate to say it, but we’re like sitting ducks, in the sense that these things can come at any time. You have to respond with whatever your protocol is, but it does take away time from education, and it gets people upset,” he said. “It makes everybody nervous, from staff to parents and the kids, so it’s just not a good situation. But I don’t think anybody, as of yet, has the answer to this.”
One of the reasons schools specifically can only take a swatting investigation so far is that under Federal Communications Commission regulations, schools cannot gain access to certain caller ID information. According to Depew, up until this point, the FCC has not granted schools the same authority as government buildings or police stations when it comes to the requirement of companies to turn over caller ID data.
“We are asking the FCC to augment their verbiage to include schools because, quite frankly, we believe that if you were calling to swat or spoof a police station or the White House, if you’re doing it to a school, it should be the same thing,” Depew said. “The FBI should have the ability to access all records necessary to bring these people to justice within a very short period of time, and there should be no regulation that protects people when they’re committing a crime.”
To try to remedy this problem, New York’s two U.S. Senators, Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, along with Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney of New York’s 18th Congressional District, teamed up last month to urge the FCC to issue a waiver to the Middletown School District, allowing the district access to calling party number data.
According to a statement by Schumer, prior waivers have been granted under similar circumstances, including ones provided to the Liberty School District in Missouri and to NASA. The problem is that the Liberty School District had to wait four years for this waiver, which Schumer argues is far too long. Schumer sought expedited consideration of the district’s limited waiver petition so that the district can have access to the caller ID identification as soon as possible.
“Middletown schools deserve access to all of the tools needed to ensure these criminals are brought to justice — before any more precious hours of education are lost, business revenue reduced, and law enforcement resources wasted,” Schumer said in a statement.
More recently, at a Justice Department oversight hearing on March 9, Sen. Schumer brought up the growing swatting problem, specifically mentioning the incidents at Middletown schools. U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, saying that the Justice Department does not consider these incidents pranks or childish calls, but takes them seriously.
“They divert scarce law enforcement resources to incidents that are not in fact accurate,” Lynch said. “They terrify, particularly children, parents, and cause long-term issues with the school districts that are dealing with this. We take them very seriously, and where we do find these perpetrators, we do intend to prosecute them.”
Other state and federal legislators are joining the fight, proposing steps to make it easier to track down swatting calls and to increase the penalties once culprits are found. The latest comes from Maloney, who introduced a bill on March 4 that would designate swatting as a form of domestic terrorism.
His “Stop Swatting in Our Schools Act” would also create an FBI task force to fight swatting that would work directly with Joint Terrorism Task Forces.
“Students, parents, and families in Middletown are being terrorized by swatters targeting our kids, so we should call these criminals what they are — domestic terrorists,” Maloney, whose congressional district includes Orange County, said in a statement. “By creating a specialized swatting task force, and officially designating these crimes as acts of domestic terrorism, we can take a huge step forward to stop swatting in our schools.”
Other proposed legislation includes the Interstate Swatting Hoax Act of 2015, introduced by Rep. Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, and the Anti-Swatting Act of 2015, proposed by New York State Rep. Eliot Engel. Legislation to combat spoofing has come from senators in Florida and Missouri, a testament to the far-reaching effects of swatting hoaxes.
Last year, Schumer introduced the SWAT Act, which would increase penalties for swatting perpetrators from a maximum of five years in prison to eight years, along with paying restitution to police.