
Tomlinson described one incident: "I make my way downstairs to find that there are half a dozen police with pistols drawn, shotguns, AR-15s, all pointed and flashlights all pointed at my head. We don't know when the door's going to get kicked in." "It's taken away our sanctuary," Tomlinson said of the constant harassment, adding: "We don't feel safe in our own home. Tomlinson's parents, who are senior citizens, also suffered swatting at their home about 2 hours outside of Milwaukee this year.

The couple was mostly recently swatted at their home on Tuesday, bringing the total of swatting incidents to 43. Since The Daily Beast report, the harassment escalated both online and offline. Their harassers mostly converge on a website that's cloned elsewhere so participants can migrate rapidly if their forum is ever banned by a service provider. As The Daily Beast reported, the tweet caught the attention of online trolls who soon began to harass, stalk, impersonate and defame Tomlinson and his wife, using a website of their own along with social media accounts on Reddit, Twitter and YouTube to target the couple and invite others to pile on. Tomlinson's troubles began after he posted a casual remark on Twitter in 2018 saying he'd never personally found the comedian Norm Macdonald very funny. Schubert told NBC News that the FBI's new centralized database should help the agency "get that common picture of what's going on across our nation so we can learn from that." Tomlinson's terror Swatting is increasingly enabled by technology that can be used to mask a caller's real voice, their phone number or IP address (also called "spoofing") or to make their false report sound more credible. By 2019, there were an estimated 1,000 swatting incidents domestically each year, according to a report from the Anti-Defamation League, and each incident is estimated to cost at least $10,000 to affected communities, even before expenditures on follow-up work like investigations, property repairs and counseling. No central agency has tracked swatting incidents or suspects in the U.S., so official statistics are not available. Such fatalities are incredibly rare, Shapiro noted, to the credit of highly trained SWAT teams responding to false calls.

Patrick Tomlinson and his wife, Niki Robinson.NBC NewsĪnd in 2017, a Wichita police officer - who didn't realize a caller had falsely reported a homicide and hostage situation at the home of Andrew Finch - killed Finch, 28.

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