Inside the mind of a swatter

From trolling to prank calling the cops on Twitch streamers, the new frontier of cyberbullying.

Photo Credit: Unsplashed

The gaming community may already be familiar with the term “swatting.” Coined in the US, the word refers to people prank calling the police and reporting a crime at a person’s home address. The phenomenon has mainly become famous because of Twitch, a gameplay streaming platform, with viewers often pranking streamers while live on their channel.

And if swatting is certainly more common in the US, where people have died as a consequence of it, the phenomenon has happened in the UK a few times as well.

In fact, even Mumsnet founder, Justine Robert, and another Mumsnet user were swatted here in Britain.

A young man in Southport, England, was even arrested last year for reporting fake crimes to the US authorities and accessing material he was not supposed to while playing online.

According to Cifas, a UK fraud prevention service, identity fraud increased by 11% between 2015 and 2016, with 13,000 registered episodes. Which brings the necessity to protect one’s personal information away from the Internet even more.

Finding out someone’s physical location through online resources may sound pretty much like something straight out of a Criminal Minds episode. However, the operation is much simpler than that. In fact, by getting hold of someone’s IP address, it may be possible to trace where they are using their device at that moment.

For better understanding, an IP address is a set of numbers that identify a device in a network using the Internet for communication. It’s basically your computer’s digital ID card.

“There are online IP address tracers that can show latitude and longitude,” says Twitch streamer wazoot, who prefers to remain anonymous. “You can also hack email accounts to find personal information like a street address. It’s pretty commonplace.”

Even easier than that, sometimes by simply looking at people’s social media posts one may be able to gather sensitive information about them and figure out where they live.

Thinking of adding your geographic location to that Facebook post for your friends to know? Think again.

A survey I conducted to find out whether people are familiar with the dangers of the Internet, showed that out of 18 respondents, only two didn’t feel safe at all online. The rest of them felt somewhat safe while browsing, with around 44% of them posting private information on social media every now and then despite being aware of the risks of hacking.

Digging deeper into the psychology of swatting

“Some people think it’s funny, or ‘it’s just a troll, man.’ Some people also don’t see streaming as a real job,” says wazoot, “so they don’t take it seriously and rationalise it by dehumanising the streamer” - as though Twitch streamers were some sort of comedians whose scarce ability to entertain a crowd of people could entitle the viewers to throw tomatoes at them.

Sens Guino, a psychologist and esports player, says “I think the key is more on liking the way the streamer reacts to stressful situations.”

With the possibility to watch their victim as they receive a visit from an armed police patrol at their place, Twitch offers a great opportunity for these criminal pranksters to enjoy the results of their actions.

Is there something that Twitch could do to prevent swatting, though? The answer is not really. After all, the streaming platform only acts as a window from where gamers are given the possibility to show off their skills and make themselves known.

In fact, the problem lies with the overly digitised nature of the society we live in, and that gamers mostly invest their time in.

Whether you are playing Overwatch, Destiny or any other RPG games such as Revelation, you are exposing yourself to the threat. And everybody knows gamers are the best hackers, always finding ways to trick servers in order to boost their own character’s skills or increase their virtual money for in-game purchases.

What is also often not taken into consideration is that most of the online games people play have a common feature. They’re all really violent, involving shootings or other sorts of slaughter: the aim is to kill the enemy.

“Gaming brings out a lot of emotions within everyone that participates,” says Patrick Ray, esports psychologist. “I believe that most Twitch streamers and pro players are swatted due to the fact that gaming brings out extreme anger within certain gamers.”

The World Health Organisation last year coined a new mental health disorder, the gaming disorder, with people losing the sense of the real world surrounding them, as they spend whole days playing video games, which become their priority.

Ray argues that the problem begins when an individual who’s often ignored in their everyday life starts playing games.

“Sure everyone gets angry when they lose a match or whatever, but… I’m sure the fact that they need mental help in person and the anger emotions from gaming definitely can push some people to swat specific players,” he says.

Seeing a particularly successful online persona with a great following on Twitch would in the case of a mental unstable person become the cause of swatting.

“I would say that (swatters) they aren’t aware of the danger they’re putting their victim into,” says Mr Guino. It’s 2018, and while most people are on social media it still appears difficult to differentiate between what happens in the real world and what takes place on the net for some. And now that pranks have been popularised through other platforms such as Youtube, where people open channels entirely dedicated to pranks, it may seem valid enough for these people to do the same. However adapting their joke to the context, involving armed police officers probably carrying similar kinds of weapons to the ones they would use in a video game.

The metallic case of a laptop suddenly becomes a shield behind which illicit actions can be committed without any worries, even if that involves getting an innocent person arrested or, even worse, killed.