SWAT teams deployed in 911 telephone fraud

[RamboLiberal]

Source: MSNBC/AP

Doug Bates and his wife, Stacey, were in bed around 10 p.m., their 2-year-old daughters asleep in a nearby room. Suddenly they were shaken awake by the wail of police sirens and the rumble of a helicopter above their suburban Southern California home. A criminal must be on the loose, they thought.

Doug Bates got up to lock the doors and grabbed a knife. A beam from a flashlight hit him. He peeked into the backyard. A swarm of police, assault rifles drawn, ordered him out of the house. Bates emerged, frightened and with the knife in his hand, as his wife frantically dialed 911. They were handcuffed and ordered to the ground while officers stormed the house.

The scene of mayhem and carnage the officers expected was nowhere to be found. Neither the Bateses nor the officers knew that they were pawns in a dangerous game being played 1,200 miles away by a teenager bent on terrifying a random family of strangers.

They were victims of a new kind of telephone fraud that exploits a weakness in the way the 911 system handles calls from Internet-based phone services. The attacks — called "swatting" because armed police SWAT teams usually respond — are virtually unstoppable, and an Associated Press investigation found that budget-strapped 911 centers are essentially defenseless without an overhaul of their computer systems.

While Doug and Stacey Bates were cuffed on the ground that night in March 2007, 18-year-old Randal Ellis, living with his parents in Mukilteo, Wash., was nearly finished with the 27-minute yarn about a drug-fueled murder that brought the Orange County Sheriff's Department SWAT team to the Bateses' home.



Read more: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28965633/

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Frightening. And someone is going to get killed - either cop or innocent civilian.

[BlooInBloo]

1. Doug's lucky the terrorists didn't kill him.

[struggle4progress]

2. Not LBN: Randal Ellis was sentenced nearly a year ago

Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Hacker gets prison for false 911 report
Report from Washington state man led sheriff's deputies to descend en masse on Lake Forest home.
By ERIKA I. RITCHIE
The Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/ellis-call-caller-2006151-calls-team

[Whoa_Nelly]

3. Buying a Caller ID cover is legal

shit.


Good article.
Shitty punk people who do this kind of thing.

[Proletariatprincess]

4. This is a despicable action, but when did we accept that a swat team is the appropriate response to

a anonymous 911 call? We are a fearful nation who has given way to much power to law enforcement and tacitly accept the overreaction enforcement officers. It is only pure luck that none of these innocents were not killed or injured. I blame the hacker first, but also the cowboy approach to law enforcement.

[vadawg]

5. i think when its a drug fuelled murder then swat is appropriate

or do yo uthink i should just turn up on my own and walk straight into a deathtrap. jeez get real the whole point of these prank calls is to get swat activated so the caller makes it as dangerous as possible for LEOs

[LisaL]

7. If caller claims there is a murder in progress, WTF do you expect?

[cabluedem]

11. Problem is that old cellphones that have no service can still dial 911, its

mandatory by law that the cellphones are made that way and taxes are paid for the 911 system by the cellphone users who do have service, not those who use them for purposes like this.

I have heard of lots of 911 cellphone pranks, over the years, due to the stupidity of this law. We used to get along pretty well without cellphones, so if you cant pay for the service your phone should not work at all, even on 911.

[Baby Snooks]

12. But they save some lives that way...

Old cellphones are often provided to victims of domestic abuse/violence and stalking victims so they can call 911. So they save lives. Apparently someone has found out that all the old cellphones have the ability to dial 911 and decided to have a little fun. Some fun. I hope they catch them and send them off to prison for a long, long time. Someone could have been killed. And next time, someone might be killed.

There are other ways to bypass trace systems. One is called spoofing. It substitutes a number for the real number. On all systems. Several stalking victims have found their own number on their caller id. Their stalker's way of having a little fun. And apparently that's the number that shows up on call trace. Which makes it look like they're calling themselves. Welcome to the new age of technology. Happened to me. I reported it. No one does anything about it. The excuse is always there is nothing they can do about it. There are millions of stalking victims told the same thing every year in this country.

That is apparently not the problem here. The problem is someone having found an old cellphone and realizing it still dials 911.

[LisaL]

6. Somebody can easily end up killed or seriously injured over this.

[truthisfreedom]

8. '"Nobody ever thought anyone would get hurt or die from a SWAT call," he said.'

Fucking bullshit, kid. You've seen a million episodes of COPS. You know all about police brutality. You knew exactly what you were doing. Unleash a bunch of misguided, over-excited cops on innocent victims with your fraud... you deserve to die in prison.

[LisaL]

9. Exactly.

Like in the OP story, the owner grabbed a knife and went outside. Police could have easily shot him.
The man could have ended up dead over a prank phone call. In fact recently police killed a guy who went outside with baseball bat because he heard a commotion of police following someone.

[Tangerine LaBamba]

10. Speaking of SWAT teams,

this was in the Magazine of Sunday's Washington Post - http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/23/AR2009012302935_pf.html



And the guy is the MAYOR of Berwyn, a little suburb in Maryland, not far from DC.

If anyone still thinks he or she is safe at home, they're so wrong. Our Fourth Amendment protections have been systematically eroded since Wolf v. Rice was decided by the button-down court of King Rehnquist in 1976. I know, because I was one of David Rice's lawyers, and he's serving a life sentence for a crime he didn't commit, thanks to J. Edgar Hoover's COINTELPRO.

Live in fear, people.