![]() In trying to explain his work to the rest of his team, Finley used a whiteboard to map out the swatters via various VoIP services and proxies. The Fulton County district attorney agreed to transfer prosecution of the case to the swatter’s local jurisdiction, where it is still pending. ![]() Finley doesn’t know why swatter No 1 targeted that family in Georgia, but he believes it was a mistake – the location was the former address of another teenager who was a highly visible gamer on YouTube. He was a 16-year-old active in online gaming circles, where swatting is a common malicious prank. When Finley contacted local police, he discovered this individual had been linked to similar crimes in the past. As it turns out, the second attack was a copycat of the first, which had received broad media attention.įinley caught a break when he traced the calls from swatter No 1 to a cloud services firm in New York, to whom the swatter had given his real name and address. But the paths he followed kept diverging – the first call pointed toward a person in New York, the second indicated a swatter in Canada. “Tracking them down was a hell of a task.” Canadian police knew exactly who the hoaxer wasĪt first, Finley says, he was looking for a single perpetrator. “A lot of the IP addresses that were generated through the subpoena and court order process were from virtual private networks and proxy sites all over the world,” Finley says. Over the next year he filled a conference room at the Johns Creek station with boxes of police reports, victim affidavits, and audio recordings. Finley then went to the victims of the swatting attacks, some of whom were already working with local law enforcement, and obtained their details. Sure enough, they had received emergency calls on the dates and times in question. Tracking them down was a hell of a task Ben Finley Over the next few weeks, Finley scanned the list of numbers looking for those characteristic of public police lines – such as 877-ASK-LAPD – and talked to the dispatchers in each city. In late January 2014, Finley issued subpoenas to a half dozen major VoIP providers, obtaining the numbers the swatters had called, logs detailing when each call had been made, and the email addresses and websites swatters used when signing up for VoIP services. To mask their true locations, they use voiceover-IP (VoIP) numbers that appear to be in the same area code as their intended victims. Because calling 911 only connects to local emergency services, swatters in distant locations call non-emergency lines and ask to be transferred. I was baptized by fire.”įinley started by tracing the numbers the swatters used to call the Johns Creek emergency hotline. I would just take each piece of the puzzle and see where it led me. “I called anyone I thought might know anything about these types of investigations. “When I started out I had never worked one of these cases and had no idea what to do,” says Finley, an amiable man with a buttery Georgia drawl. It’s a case that demonstrates just how difficult it is to track down and prosecute online harassers, thanks in part to the ease with which malicious individuals can operate anonymously on the internet, and a legal system that is still playing catchup to 21st century technology. It would take him on a circuitous voyage that lasted nearly a year and involved dozens of local law enforcement agencies, the FBI, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. This time the Johns Creek police were prepared: they responded with two cruisers to make sure everything was OK.ĭS Ben Finley was assigned to the case and was told to do whatever it took to find the people who did this. Just more than a week later, on 25 January 2014, someone launched a second swatting attack on the same home. They were victims of a swatting attack, a malicious form of hoax where special weapons and tactics (Swat) teams are called to a victim’s home under false pretenses, with potentially deadly results. The father, who had been on a plane, landed at Atlanta’s international airport to see his house on TV, with news reports declaring that his wife and children had been shot. When the mother returned from shopping she found her home surrounded by emergency vehicles. But when they arrived there were no signs of a shooting inside, police found a nanny with two small children.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |