INSTAGRAM ‘SWATTED’
Cop-raid trick vs. CEO in W. Village
The CEO of Instagram and his family are being targeted by bogus 911 calls — including one that sent armed police officers and hostage negotiators to a Manhattan home on Sunday, The Post has learned.
A 911 caller claiming to be the brother of Instagram boss Adam Mosseri told cops an armed man had barricaded himself in his Greenwich Village apartment — triggering a heavy police response involving the NYPD’s Emergency Service Unit that shut down several city blocks, according to police.
But when officers broke down the door to the one-bedroom condo at around 11 a.m., there was no one there, police said.
Cops would later learn that the 911 caller was able to use a phone number belonging to Mosseri’s brother to make the call, lawenforcement sources said.
Last week, Mosseri’s own home, a mansion in San Francisco’s Mission District, was also “swatted” — Internet-prankster slang for calling in phony 911 calls to send cops to a rival’s doorstep, according to law-enforcement sources. The San Francisco Police Department descended on the $6 million home only to discover the 911 call was a hoax, sources said.
The faux emergencies appear to be part of a pattern: Other Facebook and Instagram execs have faced similar harassment over the last few months, sources said.
The head of security for Facebook, which owns Instagram, told NYPD detectives that the social-media giant was working with the FBI and the Secret Service to investigate the incidents, according to sources.
In January, a senior Facebook executive was targeted when a man called authorities in Palo Alto, Calif., and said he had shot his wife, tied up his children, and had barricaded himself in his home with pipe bombs, The Wall Street Journal reported.
It was unclear how many other incidents have occurred over the last few months — or why the callers were targeting the heads of social-media companies.
“Several of our executives and members of their families have been targeted by false police reports,” Facebook spokesman Anthony Harrison confirmed.
Shortly before the attack in January, a list of home addresses for some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names had appeared on the message board 8chan, a cesspool of white supremacy and child pornography that was taken offline in August.
The FBI and Secret Service did not respond to requests for comment. One FBI source in the bureau confirmed they were looking into the attacks.
Mosseri could not be reached and his brother did not return messages.