A California family that found their apartment surrounded by more than a dozen heavily SWAT armed officers are among the latest victims of swatting, a crime designed to elicit an emergency response by reporting a bogus 911 call.

Officers from the Salinas Police Department rushed to the apartment last Wednesday after receiving a report from someone claiming to be a 15-year-old boy saying three men wielding AK-47 assault weapons were trying to break into his apartment. The caller said he was hiding in a closet to elude the gunmen.

Swatting uses a combination of social engineering, phone phreaking and computer hacking to harass individuals. In many cases, the swatter will trick the victim into divulging a physical address and then use a VoIP system to make it look like the victim has initiated an emergency call from his address. This often prompts a response from SWAT teams who conduct emergency raids on the homes of people whose numbers were spoofed.

In the past several weeks, four individuals have pleaded guilty to participating in a series of swatting hoaxes that over a course of five years snared as many as 100 victims and losses of more than $250,000. They face maximum penalties of five years each in prison and fines of $250,000.

A suspect in a separate swatting incident in Orange County, California, faces charges including computer access and fraud, false imprisonment by violence, falsely reporting a crime and assault with an assault weapon by proxy. ®

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