Stillwater hoax could have been `swatting'
The person calling Stillwater police fabricated a worst- case scenario on Sunday, saying they had hostages in an apartment building and laid pipe bombs throughout the property.
He also demanded a large sum of cash and said one of the hostages had been shot.
As expected, the call triggered a significant response from police and the Oklahoma Highway Patrol bomb squad, but after hours of searching Prime Place Apartments, they found no evidence of a hostage situation.
The only crime appears to be the phone call, a dangerous, sometimes deadly prank known as “swatting.”
The name comes from tactical police squads known as SWAT teams who often respond to these kinds of calls.
Swatting became more widely known as livestreamers playing video games online became targets of the prank; dozens of webcam videos posted to sites like YouTube show police bursting into view, guns drawn and shouting commands.
“Yes, it does kind of meet that definition( of swatting ),” said Ca pt. Kyle Gibbs of the Stillwater Police Department.
In this case, however, police aren't certain if there was a specific target.
The caller never gave an apartment number, so police evacuated the entire apartment complex and went room- by- room searching for a crime scene that didn't exist.
In the eyes of Oklahoma law, swatting is a “terrorism hoax” punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Anyone convicted of that crime also could have to pay restitution to the victim and cover costs of the police response.
Gibbs said police still are trying to pinpoint the caller's location.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has offered its assistance.
“We have some leads. We' re certainly able to track it back through our call system, and we're working with our service carrier to backtrack where the originating source was,” Gibbs said.
Terroristic hoaxes aren't new, but t he pop culture connection has grown stronger as internet personalities earned fame by live-streamin gt hem selves playing
video games. Hackers can find out where their online enemies live and call local police through their computer, sometimes masking their location.
While many incidents are defused once police learn it's fake, swatting sometimes has dire results.
In 2017, Wichita, Kansas, police shot and killed a man during a swatting hoax triggered by a $1.50 bet.
Two years earlier in northeastern Oklahoma, a hoax led to a town's police chief being shot as he forced his way into the victim's home after the false call.
Gibbs said he's not aware of an incident like this happening in Stillwater before.
“I'm certainly not familiar with an incident of this magnitude,” he said.