Swatting is becoming the plague of emergency workers across the country. Swatting occurs when someone makes a prank call to an emergency service using a spoofed phone number so that it cannot be traced back to them. They call about a hostage situation, fear of a bomb, or other circumstance that will cause SWAT teams to be dispatched.
In early March 2008, a Washington state man did exactly that, falsifying his phone number and making a call to dispatch armed police to the private homes of 12 people who were completely innocent of the crimes he reported over the phone. However, the caller spoofing did not protect this man who has now been sentenced to 30 months in prison and has been fined $ 24,000 for restitution to the departments of emergency workers who were scammed.
The first person to be sentenced for coup by a federal court was Guadalupe Santana MartÃnez. Martinez, a 31-year-old man, was sentenced in Dallas for many different crushing crimes along with 4 other admitted accomplices. These additional co-conspirators are scheduled to face their own sentence within the months of March and April 2008.
At his hearing, Martinez pleaded guilty to conspiracy (one count) and in his plea agreement, admitted that he was guilty of two other hitting incidents against Stephanie Proulx and her father in 2006. All of Martinez’s victims, including her Mrs. Proulx They were participants in a party line against which Martinez had apparently become bitter.
In the 2006 crush calls, Martinez had called the police at the non-emergency number and informed the police that he had killed members of the Proulx family by shooting them and that he was currently under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs. . He said he was holding the rest of the family hostage and demanded $ 50,000 in cash as well as the cost of transportation to cross the Mexican border or he would kill the hostages with an AK-47. In those crushing cases, Martinez forged his number using Spoofcard, making it appear that the calls had been made from the home of his victims.
In October 2006, the FBI became involved when a police detective informed them of the case that had involved the same victims twice. The FBI rushed to arrest Martinez outside a Denny’s restaurant in a Seattle suburb in January 2007. Martinez has also admitted to hitting at least ten other times since 2004; most of which occurred in Washington state.
Experts say you should always take extra steps to protect yourself against telemarketers and nuisance calls alike, as you never know when you may become the target of something more complicated.