Waves of fake threats to colleges are putting students on edge and testing dispatchers

MISSION, Kan. (AP) — 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.

Students at some schools spent hours hiding under desks, only to find out later it was someone’s idea of a entertainment. On Thursday, several historically Black colleges locked down or canceled classes after receiving threats, at a time when the fatal shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk 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 suburban Denver high school and another two weeks ago at a Catholic church in Minneapolis that killed two schoolchildren and injured 21 people.

“We have so many mass shootings in this country and so many young people die,” said Wendy Via, co-founder and CEO of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. “And so you can’t just blow it off because there has been a bunch of hoaxes.”

Swatting calls are on the rise

The goal of swatting 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 guidance on how to spot hoax calls. Clues include if the caller can’t 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 Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, 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’s 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 “shake your faith”

“We want there to be a reason they were doing it,” he said. “And they were doing it for the LOLs.”

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’t get through because it will be directed to the dispatch center closest to their location. Swatters instead resort to calling non-emergency police numbers.

“That should be a dead giveaway,” said Don Beeler, chief executive officer of TDR Technology Solutions, which tracks swatting calls and offers technology to prevent them. “You’re not going to look it up if you are in an emergency. That’s just not how the human brain works.”

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’s name slightly wrong, calling it Kansas City State University, referencing a city around 120 miles (193 kilometers) away.

“Obviously, if you were from Manhattan or attending a university, you would know the name of the university,” 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’s 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 “sounded 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.

“I’m not sure ma’am. I’m not sure if they have a phone or not,” 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.

“I often wonder if people don’t have something better to do,” Ascher said, pausing. “It is just very taxing on law enforcement.”

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.

“I hope we’re not desensitized enough to this enough to the point where we don’t take these alerts seriously anymore,” said Miceala Morano, a 21-year-old senior journalism major, who took cover after a recent threat at the University of Arkansas. “Unfortunately, it still is a very real possibility.”

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DeMillo reported from Little Rock, Arkansas