According to a 22-year FBI veteran who spoke to Fox News, advances in artificial intelligence have contributed to a rise in swatting calls, leading police to rush to scenes where they are ready for the worst and putting Americans’ emotional health or possibly their lives in danger.
“They’re doing it to create chaos,” said James Turgal, vice president of the information security company Optiv. “They’re utilizing this technology, which emboldens them because it’s so much harder for law enforcement to track that back.”
‘Frightening’ AI Swatting Component
Swatting has increased in frequency over the past ten years as it has gotten simpler for callers to hide their voices, phone numbers, and IP addresses in order to remain anonymous. Swatting is when someone makes a bogus 911 report in order to provoke a big and forceful police reaction. According to the FBI, nearly 200 incidents have been logged since May 1 in a national database that was formed this year as a result of the increase.
“The FBI takes swatting very seriously because it puts innocent people at risk,” an FBI spokesperson told Fox News on Thursday. “We will continue to work with our local, state, and federal law enforcement partners to gather, share, and act upon threat information as it comes to our attention.”
Swatting calls were not formally tracked prior to the creation of the database. However, a study from the Anti-Defamation League cited a retired FBI agent named Kevin Kolbye who estimated that the number of instances increased from 400 in 2011 to over 1,000 in 2019.
“They’re utilizing different virtual private networks, they’re bouncing off of IP addresses from different places trying to anonymize themselves, and it’s really the ability to wreak as much emotional havoc as possible,” Turgal said. “There’s a number of different motivations for it, and none of them are good.”
According to Turgal, swatters intend to cause mental discomfort and endanger Americans. In the previous year, swatting instances, according to his assessment, had at least doubled.
“There are some threat actors out there that actually do this as a service, as sick as that sounds,” Turgal said. “They actually put themselves out on the dark web and think, ‘well, we’ll dox, or we’ll SWAT any type of organization that you want us to. You pay us a fee, and we’ll do it.'”
He added that international terrorists may place swatting calls using AI masking technologies.
“There’s a lot of countries out there now, not to be named, that would like to see the U.S. in chaos,” Turgal added. “They would like to create help to create that situation.”
Fake threats have increasingly started to target schools. According to the Educator’s School Safety Network, fake active shooter reports made up about 64% of all violent occurrences during the 2022–2023 academic year.
“Threat actors out there are utilizing this technique to really cause a lot of harm and a lot of damage to a lot of local schools,” Turgal said. “It’s not just the law enforcement officers that are there rolling into this situation that they don’t know what it is. It’s the students. It’s the faculty. It’s the parents.”
“There is a tremendous mental and emotional impact that occurs with these cases, and that’s why they’re so difficult,” he continued.
For instance, according to a story from ABC News on March 30, approximately 230 New York schools were impacted by 36 fake allegations of mass shootings.
Even fatal swatting calls have occurred occasionally. For instance, in 2017, a police officer shot and killed a man in Kansas while responding to a hoax call.
The National Tactical Officers Association’s executive director, Thor Eells, annually trains about 12,000 law enforcement officers. He claimed that when teaching about swatting, his team must take into account the additional issues raised by cutting-edge AI.
“The authenticity component of the AI is frightening,” Eells told Fox News. “It’s really incumbent upon us now to be more proactive than ever in recognizing that these technologies can be used in a negative manner as well as a positive manner.”
One of the worries that police officers have to deal with when dealing with a fake threat is the potential that the hoax was set up so someone might divert law enforcement while they conduct a crime somewhere else, according to Eells.
“When you do draw limited resources away from an area and then have an incident of legitimate criminal purpose take place, it’s a delayed response,” Eells said. “That could have an impact on the outcome.”
Eells emphasised that the key to reducing the threat of cybercrime is communication between the police, schools, and the local population.
“It is very, very important for law enforcement … from their 911 communications centres to their first responders, to their supervisors, to be proactive,” Eells said. They should be “educating, gaining knowledge, and putting steps and procedures into place to mitigate and to minimize the dangers involved with this.”
