School Swatting News Round Up

Across the country, school “swattings” are becoming more common and a very alarming trend. The practice involves calling in fake “active shooter” calls and other threats, in the form of frantic, believable calls, in order to solicit a fierce police and fire response. This ultimately consumes valuable first responder resources and disrupting the school day. These resources are drawn away from true, life threatening emergencies. In over half the month of September, WIRED found more than 90 false reports of school shooters across the US. Perhaps October 14th 2022 was New Jersey’s “turn”, inflicting fear across the state to parents, students and teachers that their school was next in a dark, disturbing string of school shootings that have rocked our nation.

Although we do not have enough information on what happened in New Jersey on October 14 2022, prior incidents investigated by WIRED found that the calls were all made from an out-of-state phone number, from a person with a “heavy” accent. Given the relative ease of phone number spoofing with Voice-over-IP internet phone services, the call may have not even come from the United States at all. The FBI said that the call was traced to an “African country known for harboring terrorists.”. The calls below are a sample of called in “Swattings” to six different states. I will also note that the call is full of what we call in the tech industry “packet loss” or “dropouts” — making it almost certain a Voice over IP call — and possibly from a very far off location, given the phone call “latency”, or delay, observed.

To further reiterate, we do not know if this particular man or any other out-of-country person, is responsible for what happened in New Jersey today. The hope is we will learn more about who this caller was — and if it sounded like the same person. It very well could have been a domestic source.

In the early afternoon, many police departments echo’ed a Facebook post and pushed out text alerts using Nixle, indicating that the county’s schools were swamped with fake “active shooter” calls. It is ultimately not clear how many schools were actually affected. Police presence was bolstered at local schools across the county. However, the biggest response (CMC Herald/Paywall/Limited Access) appears to have been Lower Township Regional.

At 12:08, we observed the CBS-3 KYW newscopter (operated by Helicopters Inc) departing out of Philly and circling both the Vineland Senior High School incident and then heading over to Lower Township Regional High School, on ADS-B Exchange, as well as our own fleet of ADS-B receivers (Note: Cape May Scanner feeds into the ADS-B Exchange Network)

While we are not sure if this is a complete, accurate list, the amount of responses to these calls was quite astounding. Additionally, police departments sent additional units to each school in Cape May County out of an abundance of caution.