MISSION, Kan. (AP) 鈥 Around 50 college campuses across the country have been deluged in recent weeks with hoax calls about armed gunmen and other violence, laying bare the challenges of detecting fake threats quickly to prevent mass panic.
hiding under desks, only to find out later it was someone鈥檚 idea of a entertainment. On Thursday, several locked down or canceled classes after receiving threats, at a time when the fatal shooting of at a Utah college had campuses newly on edge.
In other cases, schools figured out early that something was amiss, but even then it took time and resources.
The FBI is investigating, but so far there have been no arrests.
Dispatch call centers often are the last lines of defense to swatters, a burden in an era of mass shootings, including one this week at a and another two weeks ago at a Catholic church in that killed two schoolchildren and injured 21 people.
鈥淲e have so many mass shootings in this country and so many young people die,鈥 said Wendy Via, co-founder and CEO of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. 鈥淎nd so you can鈥檛 just blow it off because there has been a bunch of hoaxes.鈥
Swatting calls are on the rise
is to get authorities, particularly a SWAT team, to respond to an address and has roots in fake bomb threats that have been around for decades.
Some of the earliest swats stemmed from online gaming disputes. But gradually they became connected to nihilistic groups, which often conduct the calls in mass batches, trading tips in online forums on how to avoid detection.
The FBI said swatting is on the rise. Since a center was created in 2023 to gather details on swatting incidents, hundreds of law enforcement agencies have voluntarily submitted thousands of incidents, the FBI said.
Swatting has become so prevalent that the U.S. Department of Education offered on how to spot hoax calls. Clues include if the caller can鈥檛 answer follow-up questions about their phone number or current location, or mispronounces names.
Some swats linked to the group Purgatory
Purgatory, a group affiliated with The Com, which is a loose network of online threat actors, has been linked to some of the recent swats, according to reports from the , an Alabama-based nonprofit that tracks extremist groups online, and the nonprofit Center for Internet Security and Institute for Strategic Dialogue. The FBI declined to comment on the reports.
On more than two hours of livestreams captured by the nonprofits and provided to The Associated Press, the caller鈥檚 friends can be heard in the background laughing, belching and taking breaks to rap.
Keven Hendricks, a cyber crime expert who teaches law enforcement about investigating swatting, said the calls 鈥渟hake your faith鈥
鈥淲e want there to be a reason they were doing it,鈥 he said. 鈥淎nd they were doing it for the LOLs.鈥
Spotting a swat
One swatting attempt last month at Kansas State University serves as a case study of sorts on spotting a swat.
There were clues from the start that something was amiss. The first red flag was that it wasn’t a 911 call, said Major Daryl Ascher, of the Riley County Police Department. Police declined to provide their own recording of the call, but Ascher confirmed many of the details.
Emergency calls are geolocated, meaning someone calling 911 outside the targeted area won鈥檛 get through because it will be directed to the dispatch center closest to their location. Swatters instead resort to calling non-emergency police numbers.
鈥淭hat should be a dead giveaway,鈥 said Don Beeler, chief executive officer of TDR Technology Solutions, which tracks swatting calls and offers technology to prevent them. 鈥淵ou’re not going to look it up if you are in an emergency. That’s just not how the human brain works.鈥
He said that if its system detects a suspicious call like that, it is transferred to an automated recording that tells the caller to hang up and dial 911.
On the technical side, halting calls made using voice over internet protocol technology, or VoIP, from being made from behind virtual private networks would stop most swats, said Hendricks, who has been swatted himself.
Dispatchers look for clues
The next clue was that the swatter got the Manhattan, Kansas, school鈥檚 name slightly wrong, calling it Kansas City State University, referencing a city around 120 miles (193 kilometers) away.
鈥淥bviously, if you were from Manhattan or attending a university, you would know the name of the university,鈥 Ascher said.
As a giggling throng listened on messaging platform Telegram, the swatter then described a man armed with an AR-15 prowling the university鈥檚 library, a description that was nearly identical to the calls flooding other university towns. The gunfire that peppered the call also was a tip-off because it 鈥渟ounded like it was from a TV,” Ascher said.
On the livestream, the clearly skeptical dispatcher asked why the caller couldn’t see the purported gunman when the shots sounded so close to him and why other 911 calls weren’t flooding in.
鈥淚鈥檓 not sure ma鈥檃m. I鈥檓 not sure if they have a phone or not,鈥 the caller answered.
Officers still were dispatched to the library. Ascher provided no details on how many or their tactics, but said dispatchers kept them informed of the potential it was a hoax.
鈥淚 often wonder if people don鈥檛 have something better to do,鈥 Ascher said, pausing. 鈥淚t is just very taxing on law enforcement.鈥
It’s also been taxing on students.
The worry is that hoaxes will create complacency at campuses where active shooter alerts and drills have become a regular part of life.
鈥淚 hope we鈥檙e not desensitized enough to this enough to the point where we don鈥檛 take these alerts seriously anymore,鈥 said Miceala Morano, a 21-year-old senior journalism major, who took cover after a recent threat at the University of Arkansas. 鈥淯nfortunately, it still is a very real possibility.鈥
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DeMillo reported from Little Rock, Arkansas
