Apparently this a thing now. Rival gamers will call in a shooting incident on someone who is live streaming so that the SWAT will come in and raid whoever is streaming. Check out an engadget article here, and a video of one posted yesterday below..
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Twitch Gamer Gets "Swatted"
Last posted
Aug 31, 2014 at 11:49AM EDT.
Added
Aug 28, 2014 at 11:41AM EDT
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Precious Roy
ModeratorDeactivated
Wow, from the description I thought it was just another name for a specific kind of raid, but this is dangerous. Shame on whoever does this, you're messing with real people, not a bunch of polygons like in a game.
Capricornicus Genesis
Deactivated
Gotta admire how calm he was during the whole thing. He also acted like it wasn't the first time this has happened.
Eggo My Leggo
Deactivated
Well I was watching his live stream when it happened, so I thought this moment was a joke because Kootra was playing Counter Strike ('cause well you know). Instead when the others figured it did not look pretended, we all freaked out. I think the police got the caller, so I really hope that dude regrets what he's done.
Calling this a "trend" that gamers are doing to each other is rather quickly jumping the gun (no pun intended) don't you think? How many reports are there of this happening? The article cites 2, and one of them didn't even have to do with streaming. The Creatures are a high profile group, people target them for "pranks" all the time. This one was quite creative (along with extremely dangerous), but there isn't enough here to warrant an article claiming it's happening everywhere.
On the video itself, that was a super stressful situation but hilarious looking back (obviously cus nobody got hurt). When Kootra was explaining to the officers what he was doing and instructing them how to shut off the stream I couldn't help but give out a few chuckles. I would pay money to see the chat log for that part of the stream.
But seriously, I'm glad nothing bad happened and everyone came out alright. I actually feel bad for the officers, they were treating this as a high threat situation as the puppet of someone's prank and thousands of people saw them look like idiots because of it.
I didn't exactly call this a trend, I called it a thing, but a quick youtube search for "swatting" or "swatted" pulls up a couple of other instances of this. It's something to watch for at least.
Iamslow
Deactivated
I think I've heard of this happening to CoD players as well.
In the video it says people started the trend targeting celebrities first, like Miley Cyrus.
The video in the second link says it happens hundreds of times a year.
@Cute Master:
I was more referring to the article than by your OP. This seems like a "thing" (whatever that means) and if it becomes more common (which hopefully it won't cus it's just terrible) then yeah it has potential to become a trend. I was just saying my thoughts on what this is in relation to trending/warranting a KYM page
Duke Crabtree
Banned
Video games are serious shit, you know….
What a bunch of pretentious little snots.
I think this exact same thing was done to PhantomL0rd (a League of Legends streamer) like 8-9 months ago.
If I recall correctly, some DDoS group (Derp Trolling?) came to his twitch stream and started following him and taking down servers he was playing on. After a few pizza delivery pranks, an entire SWAT team was sent to his house to solve a "hostage situation".
As stupid as it is, it might be a "thing".
Hmm, so now that it's made ABC and other national news outlets, I'm almost sure this is going to come a "thing." Oh well. Might as well enjoy.
wow I cant believe it, a single anonymous call mobilized an entire SWAT team, that was really dangerous but I couldn't help but chuckle.
Mrsoulcake The music lover
Deactivated
I get the feeling that the mainstream media will somehow find a way to turn this into "New media is bad". We can only hope that whatever asshats who do this type of thing get caught.
And now we have a page. lol.
Added some more videos to it I came across on YT. Can't believe "swatting" is that big/old. It took Kootra being raided to really bring it to the light I guess. We'll just have to see where it goes from here.
This has got to be super illegal, right? They must be able to track those assholes down, don't they?
Ticklechap Crispybottom wrote:
This has got to be super illegal, right? They must be able to track those assholes down, don't they?
Ticklechap Crispybottom wrote:
This has got to be super illegal, right? They must be able to track those assholes down, don't they?
Very illegal.
And this is why many people tend to oppose anonymity on the internet; stupid shit due to butthurt idiots leading to serious problems.
Which is a damn shame, because of how hard the majority of us have fought to stay anonymous.