Canadian Teen Arrested For Calling In 30+ Swattings, Bomb Threats 350
tsu doh nimh (609154) writes "A 16-year-old male from Ottawa, Canada has been arrested for allegedly making at least 30 fraudulent calls — including bomb threats and 'swattings' — to emergency services across North America over the past few months. Canadian media isn't identifying the youth because of laws that prevent the disclosure, but the alleged perpetrator was outed in a dox on Pastebin that was picked up by journalist Brian Krebs, who was twice the recipient of attempted swat raids at the hand of this kid. From the story: 'I told this user privately that targeting an investigative reporter maybe wasn't the brightest idea, and that he was likely to wind up in jail soon. But @ProbablyOnion was on a roll: That same day, he hung out his for-hire sign on Twitter, with the following message: "want someone swatted? Tweet me their name, address and I'll make it happen."'"
Re:Autoimmune disorder... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yep. Back when Osama bin Hidin was running around, all it took was a video to make the U.S. clench its buttcheeks.
Now it just takes a 16 year old prankster.
Re:Good, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
The next time someone calls with the exact same wording, and they don't respond appropriately.....you'll be calling for their heads to roll.
It seems you've mixed me up with imbeciles who want perfect safety and find it acceptable for authority figures to ruin innocent people's lives. That is a mistake, because I'm not like that.
Take note that you're talking to a specific individual. After the 9/11 attacks, I was opposed to the government taking away our freedoms and giving us 'safety'.
It's very troubling when the police overreact to things and respond with an overwhelming amount of force, and idiots who think the police should be 100% perfect shouldn't even be taken into consideration.
Re:Autoimmune disorder... (Score:2, Interesting)
It's absolutely unacceptable for a telco to report a false number to emergency services, ever. I don't care if a company wants their corporate number on the caller ID for all their calls -- if someone calls 911 from a corporate phone, it needs to have the correct number, name, and address. Same for call forwarding -- when I'm calling 911 and need the EMTs or police here NOW, they better see the number I'm actually calling from, not the one which I normally prefer to display to the world.
If a local exchange proves to be untrustworthy (repeatedly passing spoofed numbers) then they should be cut off from caller ID services and every number passed from that local exchange should be displayed on caller ID as "CALLER ID NOT VERIFIED" until they fix their issues.
Re:Autoimmune disorder... (Score:5, Interesting)
yeah, horrible phone companies, allowing a company to put their corporate number for the caller ID for all calls.
Fine if they put whatever they want in the 'caller id' that is transmitted inband at the start of the call; they should NOT be allowed to use a custom ANI; the ANI number which is used for long distance billing should be unique to the line and should be the number that calls into that line.
The police ought to be provided access to and use the more reliable ANI Billing number (Automatic Number Identification), instead of the relying upon the possibly user-spoofable Caller ID.
Re:Autoimmune disorder... (Score:4, Interesting)
A payphone, another's work or home landline, or another's cell phone. Someone elses cell phone will still work for 9-1-1 after the owner has deactivated service.
A friend of mine in Europe has 911 as the first three digits of the phone number.
Some phones will accept dialing the number without a SIM card inserted, because it starts with 911.
Re:Autoimmune disorder... (Score:5, Interesting)
If you are interested in actually learning more about such techniques I would suggest typing "call spoofing" into your favorite search engine.
Thanks for the reminder. Congresswoman Annie Kuster has been robocalling us with the CallerID spoofed to 'WIRELESS CALLER' in the past few days - been meaning to look that up.
Not that I should dare to question my betters, of course.
Re:good (Score:5, Interesting)
If you think the poor and ignorant cause harm, you should see what the wealthy and powerful do. Coming from Old Money (great-grandparent a wealthy business owner and profligate gambler, grandparent a member of all the right/wrong clubs, parents in senior civil service, £30k/year private school, &c.), I was surrounded by destructive idiots with obscene wealth who were there on anything but their own merits.
I'm all in favour of personal responsibility, but that means considering the complete chain and gamut of consequences of your actions, not merely what flows immediately from your behaviour. Those who use a snapshot of any complex system to derive a solution do a disservice to their brain.