BEACONSFIELD – On a balmy and quiet Saturday afternoon, as many as 20 police cruisers, two ambulances and a SWAT team arrived at an address on Sidney Cunningham street.
Some of the police carried machine guns, they entered a home and detained two teenagers.
Early on in their operation, police realized they had responded to a bogus emergency call.
Now they suspect that it could have been an example of a crime known in the online gaming community as “swatting.”
“We know it happens in some cities around the world,” said Daniel Richer, of the SPVM.
“New York, Vancouver, Winnipeg.”
Swatting comes out of massive multiplayer online gaming communities, where gamers play against one another over the Internet.
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Sometimes they could be in the same neighbourhood, but increasingly they are playing each other from far corners of the world.
Typically a player who is frustrated by being beaten in a game like Call of Duty or Destiny will make an anonymous bogus police call to the community where his opponent lives.
The more resources end up getting brought out to the scene, the more successful the call is considered.
“Swatting is basically some kid calls up, while they’re on a live stream, so he calls up while he knows his friend or enemy, actually, is home,” said Gregory Dudek, the director of McGill University‘s computer science school.
“And he calls up and gets police to go to the house.”
For online gamers, the crime may seem like an extension of the virtual world they inhabit.
But for law enforcement, it’s a deadly serious problem.
“You’re sending out police officers to a non-existent call. you’re drawing away police officers, and the cost in man hours in enormous,” said Claude Sarrazin, a security consultant.
“And usually it’s minors who are doing this. So even if you catch them, they’re underage. What are they going to get? A slap on the wrist. It’s craziness.”
Part of the problem, explains Chris Lee, who works at a popular video game store in Verdun, is that some players aren’t careful about the information they put in their online gaming profile.
“If you’re not careful, you can put whatever information on there, and someone can say, ‘oh, he lives here,'” he said.
While police departments are struggling to stem the problem, Dudek said technological solutions are available to prevent anonymous calls.
The problem doesn’t exist because of video games per se, he said.
“The problem is that somehow in our society today, a 15-year-old kid can go and call out a $100,000 SWAT team,” he said.
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