People attending Villanova University’s new student orientation mass were interrupted by a university-wide alert: There was an active shooter on campus.
Fearing for their lives, they awaited law enforcement response, and it came quickly. Within minutes, police swarmed the campus.
But they found no shooter. The whole thing turned out to be a “cruel hoax,” the university president said.
Such false emergency calls are known as “swatting,” or calling in a large law enforcement response to a non-existent crisis. On the same day, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga was also targeted with reports of an active shooter. Police found no threat.
Villanova’s Aug. 21 incident was not an isolated first — many public figures and institutions have been targeted by swatting.
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These hoaxes can take a heavy toll on people, communities and law enforcement, experts said. PolitiFact took a look at the history of swatting, its consequences and what could be done to address it.
Swatting has become more mainstream since 2008
The Federal Protective Service, a law enforcement agency within the Department of Homeland Security, defines swatting as “a malicious act that can involve placing false emergency calls to emergency responders, often reporting a (false) severe, ongoing crisis at a specific location.” The goal is to “provoke a significant law enforcement response, creating chaos and potentially resulting in violence,” it said.
Swatters often flag supposed violent crimes, such as shootings, bomb threats or hostage situations. They use techniques such as spoofing, or disguising phone numbers, to conceal their identity.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation called swatting a “new phenomenon” in 2008. But it’s grown.
“It was kind of a fringe practice that you saw in some online activist and hacktivist communities that’s gradually gone more mainstream,” said Gregory Winger, University of Maryland, Baltimore County political science associate professor who specializes in international security and cyberconflict.
When it started, it sometimes involved gamers or others who were fighting over handles on X, formerly Twitter, Winger said.
But public officials have been targeted as well. Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene, R-Ga., said she has been the target of at least eight swatting incidents. FBI Director Kash Patel said in June that his home was targeted by swatting.
The practice has gotten so popular that swatting-for-hire services now exist, Winger said, with some individuals linked to dozens of different swatting incidents.
In the past, people in the U.S. were often swatted by overseas perpetrators, said Amy Klinger, cofounder and director of programs for the Educator’s School Safety Network. It was so effective at creating chaos that it caught on locally, too.
Synagogues, schools and hospitals frequently targeted
Police gather at the Villanova University campus where an active shooter was reported Aug. 21, 2025, in Villanova, Pa. (AP)
Although the FBI launched a national reporting database for swatting in 2023, its dataset is not publicly available online. But we know how it has impacted some communities.
From December 2023 to January 2024, the FBI opened investigations on more than 100 threats targeting more than 1,000 institutions in 42 states and Washington, D.C. Synagogues and Jewish community centers were the most affected type of institutions, with more than 400 targeted, according to the FBI. Schools and hospitals were also affected.
One tracker, the K-12 School Shooting Database, recorded 853 swatting incidents at U.S. schools from January 2023 to June 2024.
The Educator’s School Safety Network, a national nonprofit school safety organization, analyzes violent threats and incidents in K-12 schools by compiling media reports. Its research found that there were 158 swatting incidents during the 2023-24 school year, a 64% decrease from the 446 swatting incidents it recorded in 2022-23. But incidents of swatting made up 29.5% of all cases the organization tracked, more than any other type of violent threat or incident.
One reason for the decrease is the increased prosecution of offenders, the organization said.
“The level of swatting continues to have declined over time, but it’s still clearly an issue that’s continuing to plague,” Klinger said. She said the group’s research showed that people who target schools for swatting have included those connected to the schools, such as students, disgruntled parents or people from neighboring districts.
Perpetrators cause ‘multiple levels of harm’ to communities and law enforcement
Swatting can sometimes lead to significant consequences. There’s an immediate harm to the people swatted, Winger said. There are health emergencies and deaths that have resulted from swatting, and “even just the sheer terror that comes out of it is extremely unnerving and traumatic.”
In 2020, a 60-year-old Tennessee man died of a heart attack after police responded to his home with guns drawn after someone reported a murder at his home. There was no murder in the home, but the fake report was made by people who were pressuring him to give up his Twitter handle.
“They can be traumatic and anxiety provoking and upsetting and can have lingering effects especially for persons who have experienced similar things in the past (real or false positives),” said Daniel Flannery, professor and director of the Begun Center of Violence Prevention at Case Western Reserve University, in an email.
People react at the Villanova University campus where an active shooter was reported Aug. 21, 2025, in Villanova, Pa. (AP)
Swatting also presents a major issue for law enforcement and emergency response. The police’s core task of responding to crises and saving people’s lives is “weaponized against them and against the citizens,” Winger said.
It drained law enforcement resources because officials have to treat every call seriously and with an “all hands on deck” mentality, Flannery said.
“It’s not feasible to ‘check on the legitimacy’ of every call before a massive response to decide if more resources are necessary,” Flannery said. “The most injury and death in those cases occurs in the first 3-8 minutes so immediate response and action are paramount.”
In schools, Klinger said, swatting incidents take up instructional time and cause trauma. “I think the biggest impact is on the people within the organization, the students and the faculty staff,” she said. “Because for that five minutes or 20 minutes or however long it took to realize it was swatting, during that period of time people are, you know, responding literally to try to save their lives.”
Prosecution for perpetrators, improved training and awareness needed to combat swatting, experts say
Preventing swatting requires a multifaceted response, experts said. Flannery, Winger and Klinger said perpetrators need to be identified and need to face significant consequences, such as criminal charges and stiff penalties or incarceration.
The Justice Department has charged numerous people for swatting, including a swatter-for-hire and people from other countries. The California teenager who advertised the swatting service was sentenced to four years in prison. A Washington state man was sentenced to three years in prison for felonies stemming from swatting.
“We can’t have people just go, ‘Oh, well, that was just a bad joke.’ No, it’s not. It’s a criminal act. It’s an aggressive attack on the institution, and so we need to treat it as such,” Klinger said.
Increased awareness and improved training for emergency response call centers can also help address the issue, Winger said.
“We are way past innocent pranking by immature adolescents or young adults who may just want to get back at a peer or an institution for some grievance,” Flannery said. “These are not innocent pranks or jokes that do no harm.”
PHOTO: Danny Wild/Imagn Images