Livestreaming has become particularly popular in the gaming community, as highly skilled gamers can earn money from sharing their gameplay online.  For perspective, Twitch became the fourth largest source of Internet traffic in 2014, and Amazon purchased the company later that year for $970 million.  Twitch and similar platforms allow viewers to interact with and donate to their favorite content producers.  Users can access creators in a highly intimate, novel way.  While this feature helps foster close-knit, collaborative communities, it can also breed deviant behavior. By innocently live streaming from their room and chatting with online fans, a streamer may accidentally place themselves at risk of swatting.  Bad actors can collect information about a Twitch streamer by carefully observing the person’s room via webcam or eliciting key details through online chats.  This form of data gathering is called social hacking and involves manipulating a person into sharing their details.  Over time, one can collect a streamer’s personal information, including home address.  Armed with this information, a bad actor can make a fake 911 call, setting a “swatting” episode into motion.

The motivations behind swatting are varied.  Some “swatters” act out of spite and anger, while others see the act as a simple prank.  However, as demonstrated by the story above, the consequences of swatting are far from harmless.  Aside from threats to one’s physical health, both victims and officers can develop lasting psychological effects from the life-threatening experience.  Additionally, false alerts drain valuable emergency service resources diverting them needlessly. So, what can one do to protect themselves and their families from swatting?  While state and federal governments are considering laws to stop the behavior, the Internet’s anonymity and size make prosecuting perpetrators difficult.  However, exercising reasonable safety measures and commonsense can likely shield one from falling victim to swatting.  First, one must be mindful of the details they share online.