ShortHand: Swatting RedHanded
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- True Crime
When a SWAT team turned up at the front door of Wichita resident Andrew Finch, he only had seven seconds of confusion, before he was shot in the chest by an armed police officer. He couldn’t have ever guessed that the team of black-uniformed officers had been called as a prank – over a $1.50 bet on a game of Call of Duty.
Finch was a casualty of Swatting – a kind of real-world trolling where hoax bomb threats and homicides are called against gaming opponents. So how did it start? And what are the egotistical toerags who do it trying to prove?
When a SWAT team turned up at the front door of Wichita resident Andrew Finch, he only had seven seconds of confusion, before he was shot in the chest by an armed police officer. He couldn’t have ever guessed that the team of black-uniformed officers had been called as a prank – over a $1.50 bet on a game of Call of Duty.
Finch was a casualty of Swatting – a kind of real-world trolling where hoax bomb threats and homicides are called against gaming opponents. So how did it start? And what are the egotistical toerags who do it trying to prove?