Swatting Across N.J. Continues As Authorities Get More Tight-Lipped About Investigations

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(Kevin Shea)  It just keeps happening.

Schools, malls, even a hospital across New Jersey continue to be victimized by hoax emergency calls known as swatting.

It happened several more times in the past 24 hours, causing the lockdown, closing or evacuation of several buildings while police search for a reported bomb or gunman on the loose.

Schools in Clinton Township and Freehold Township were affected Tuesday morning, and two large malls, Monmouth Mall in Eatontown and Freehold Raceway Mall in Freehold Township, were targeted on Monday night, authorities said.

Swatting is the intentional tricking of a police department or law enforcement agency to respond in force to a certain place by calling in a fake crisis, such as a hostage situation, mass shooting or bomb threat. The term comes from the fact that most such incidents result in a SWAT team response.

As the incidents grow in numbers, frustrating police along the way, some authorities are declining to discuss the incidents in detail.

Local, state and federal authorities are increasingly reluctant to detail exactly how or with whom they are investigating the hoax calls.

Celeste Danzi, a spokeswoman for the FBI in New Jersey, said the agency does not comment on the existence, or nonexistence, of criminal investigations.

She said the agency is aware of the recent swatting incidents, and regularly receives intelligence from local and state policing partners.

The New Jersey State Police also declined to discuss swatting in detail. Spokesman Capt. Stephen Jones said only: “This continues to represent a dangerous waste of resources and we hope it does not result in death or injury of someone responding to what they think is a real emergency.”

Al Della Fave, spokesman for the Ocean County Prosecutor’s Office, which is investigating several school swattings and the five-hour shuttering of Ocean County Mall last month, said the office is working with federal authorities.

“Partnerships are developing and taking place with federal agencies,” Della Fave said. He declined to get into specifics, but said the office is working with the FBI on swatting.

It was the FBI in Connecticut that charged a 21-year-old man there in September 2014 with participating in several swatting calls, including hoax calls to St. John Vianney High School in Holmdel and Allentown High School in Allentown, both in January 2014.

swatting

Court documents in the case against the suspect, Matthew Tollis, show what investigators in New Jersey suspect, that there could be multiple offenders and the suspects might not be anywhere near the Garden State.

Tollis is charged in connection with six incidents in Connecticut, Florida, Massachusetts and New Jersey, and was part of a group, “TCOD” (TeAM CrucifiX or Die), who formed through the online gaming world.

The documents show that a Connecticut college police officer linked Tollis to a Skype logon that was used to telephone in a bomb threat at the University of Connecticut in April 2014.

Tollis also allegedly talked about he swatting incidents on a Twitter page also linked to him, court documents say.

Tollis later told police and the FBI, which eventually joined the probe, that he “joined” some of the swatting calls, but that other people were also on the calls, which were made by groups of people on Skype and Tollis “listened in.”

In an interview with investigators, Tollis claimed he never spoke during swatting calls on Skype, but had “laughed in the background.”

The documents show that Tollis admitted he stood by and never called police “as resources were wasted for hoax calls.” And he identified other members of the swatting group, including one who lives in Scotland.

Della Fave said the evidence he has seen in swatting calls and police dispatchers see on their terminals, “Is nothing that you would see on your caller ID.”

Swatters sometimes use sophisticated computer programs to mask calls, but Della Fave said, “Our tech people are doing what they can to overcome that.”

“We don’t know their motive,” Della Fave said. “We don’t know if they’re simply doing this for their own entertainment or if it is something more sinister being done by an organization or group who have future plans for an actual attack and who are using this to practice or to study our response.”

“I wished these individual would use this creativity for something good,” he said. “It causes nothing but frustration.”

Della Fave also reiterated the office’s fear that someone might get hurt during a hoax call.

Technically, it’s already happened,

Court documents in the Tollis case show that during the St. John Vianney incident in January 2014, a child hiding behind a door suffered a concussion when police swung it open.


Source Article from http://govtslaves.info/swatting-across-n-j-continues-as-authorities-get-more-tight-lipped-about-investigations/

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