What to do if you've been swatted
Maybe your front door was suddenly surrounded by officers responding to a report of a hostage situation, a bomb, or an active shooter, and you had no idea any of it was coming. Maybe nothing has happened yet, but a stranger online told you, calmly, that they knew your address and were about to make the call. Either way, you are not the first person this has happened to, and none of it is something you brought on yourself. Swatting is a deliberate attack that turns emergency responders into a weapon, and there is a clear, level-headed way to handle it.
The FBI has flagged a real rise in these calls in recent years. What started mostly as harassment between gamers and streamers has spread to families, small business owners, and public officials, often after nothing more than an argument online. Anyone whose address is findable can become a target, which is most of us.
If officers are at your door right now
Keep your hands visible and empty, move slowly, and follow every instruction exactly, even the ones that feel unnecessary. Don’t reach for a phone, a light switch, or anything else without being told to. Don’t try to explain the situation yet. Officers responding to a report of violence have no way to know in that moment that the call was fake, and their caution in those first minutes is not personal to you. The explanation comes after the scene is confirmed safe, not during.
If anyone else is in the home — a partner, kids, a roommate — the same rules apply to them. A calm household is a safer household in those first few minutes.
Once the scene is cleared
Ask the responding officer or a supervisor how to get an incident report filed that specifically notes the call was a hoax. That report matters later, for insurance, for any follow-up investigation, and so the address has context on file if something similar ever comes in again. Ask, too, whether the department keeps a false-alarm flag or participates in a registry like Smart911, which lets residents pre-register details — who lives there, pets, medical needs — so a real emergency response is safer and a repeat hoax call is easier to recognize.
Work out how they found you
Swatting only works if the caller knows where you live, and that almost always traces back to something public: a people-search or data-broker site, an old delivery or shipping record, a domain registration, or a gaming or social profile that was never meant to be tied to a real name. If you already know who’s been threatening or doxxing you, our guide on what to do if someone doxxed you covers getting that information pulled down. If you’re not sure how exposed you are, working through our steps to remove your info from people-search sites closes the most common gap first.
Report it beyond the local police report
File a complaint with the FBI at IC3.gov, and consider a tip through tips.fbi.gov as well. Swatting calls frequently cross state lines, and the FBI is positioned to connect a pattern across many local incidents in a way a single department can’t. If a threat came through a specific platform — a stream chat, a game lobby, a social account — report it there too. Most platforms treat a swatting threat as a top-tier violation and will act on it quickly when it’s reported clearly.
Save what led up to it
If anyone threatened you beforehand, capture it before it can disappear: the username, the platform, the exact wording, and a timestamp. Even an offhand “I know where you live” is worth keeping. Our guide to preserving evidence in the first 24 hours walks through doing this in a way that holds up if the case moves forward, whether that’s a police investigation or a platform ban.
Lowering the odds it happens again
Beyond registering with your local department, a few quiet habits help. Be a little more careful about broadcasting your real-time location, especially while livestreaming or posting from home. Loop in family or roommates on what happened, so no one is caught off guard if it happens a second time. And treat the privacy cleanup above as ongoing rather than one-and-done — data brokers refresh their listings, so a search of your own name every few months is worth the ten minutes.
Being swatted is frightening precisely because it was designed to be. It says nothing about you and everything about the person who made the call. Getting the report on file, closing the gap in how they found you, and having your evidence in order gives you real footing, and it makes the next call — if there is one — land on people who already know it’s not the first time.
— Gus