Advances in technology allow prank callers to mask their voice, phone number or IP address, or make their false 911 calls sound more credible.
Author Patrick Tomlinson and his wife, business owner Niki Robinson, have been “swatted” at their home in Milwaukee more than 40 times, often resulting in police pointing guns at their heads. Their tormentors have also called in false bomb threats to venues using their names in three states. Yet law enforcement hasn’t been able to stop the prank calls.
The couple’s terror comes as these incidents appear to be on the rise in the U.S., at least on college campuses. In less than a single week in April, universities including Clemson, Florida, Boston, Harvard, Cornell, Pittsburgh, Rutgers and Oklahoma, as well as Middlebury College, were targeted by swatters.
To combat the growing problem, the FBI has begun taking formal measures to get a comprehensive picture of the problem on a national level.
VOIP has more or less reduced phones to the status of email and other internet services. It’s amazing that there weren’t more trust provisions put in place for verifying phone numbers prior to the shift away from the old phone lines. The militarization of police is bad too, but it’s amazing that there was a technology change that removed a point of trust from something as important as the phone system and 911 calls. It’s a truly bizarre situation we find ourselves in, and frankly I’d rather we went back to the pre-VOIP days at this point.