Street voices
Hugues
·
United States
"Swatting. False reporting a serious crime in an attempt to incite a SWAT response at a specific address with the sole intent to terrorize someone. My god, man, did you see what happened to that one streamer last week? No? No, what happened? Dude, he got fucking swatted. Someone swatted him? Yeah, 20 guys went into his house because someone filed a false, like, hostage report, dude. Jesus."
What it means
Swatting is when someone makes a fake emergency call to send armed police to somebody else's home. It's done to terrify them, get revenge, or kick off pure chaos for content or harassment. You hear it most around streamers, gaming fallouts, doxxing, and online creeps taking a nasty joke way past the line.
Usage examples
"That streamer got swatted mid live, mate, all because some loser phoned in a fake hostage call and turned his whole house into chaos."
"The streamer from Kansas City has been swatted three times in the past eighteen months, the local police force has now flagged her home address in the dispatch system, and the FBI has finally arrested a suspect in Ohio after eighteen months of forensic work on the spoofed call records."
"Swatting has become so common in the online gaming world that the major platforms have introduced reporting mechanisms specifically for these incidents, and several US states have introduced harsher penalties to discourage the practice from spreading further to ordinary households and innocent victims."
"Some freak tried to get the lad swatted over a game rage, which is beyond pathetic."
"If you're doxxed first, getting swatted is the next proper nightmare move, so people take that threat dead serious."
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Where it comes from
The term comes from SWAT, meaning Special Weapons and Tactics, the heavily armed police units in the US. It took off in online gaming and trolling circles in the late 2000s and early 2010s, when people started making fake emergency reports to get armed officers sent to a target's address.
Editors of this term
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