The Washington Post covers "a [1]string of false reports of active shooters at a dozen U.S. universities this month as students returned to campus."

> The FBI is investigating the incidents, according to a spokesperson who declined to specify the nature of the probe. While universities have proved a popular swatting target, the agency "is seeing an increase in swatting events across the country," the FBI spokesperson said... Local officials are frustrated by the anonymous calls tying up first responders, straining public safety budgets and needlessly traumatizing college students who grew up in an era in which gun violence [2]has in some way shaped their school experience...

>

> The recent string of swattings began Thursday with a false report to the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, quickly followed by one about Villanova University later that day. Hoaxes at 10 more schools followed... Villanova also received a second threat. As the calls about shootings came in, officials on many of the campuses pushed out emergency notifications directing students and employees to shelter in place, while police investigated what turned out to be false reports. (Iowa State was able to verify the lack of a threat before a campuswide alert was sent, its police chief said. [They had a live video feed from the location the caller claimed to be from.]) In at least three cases, 911 calls reporting a shooting purported to come from campus libraries, where the sound of gunshots could be heard over the phone, officials told The Washington Post...

>

> Although false bomb reports, shooter threats and swatting incidents are not new, bad actors used to be more easily traceable through landline phones. But the era of internet-based services, virtual private networks, and anonymous text and chat tools has made unmasking hoax callers far more challenging... In 2023, a Post investigation found that more than 500 schools across the United States were [3]subject to a coordinated swatting effort that may have had origins abroad...

>

> [In Chattanooga, Tennessee last week] a dispatcher heard gunfire during a call reporting an on-campus shooting. "We grabbed everybody that wasn't already out on the street and got to that location," said University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Police spokesman Brett Fuchs. About 150 officers from several agencies responded. There was no shooter.

[4]The New York Times reports that an online group called "Purgatory" is "suspected of being connected to several of the episodes, including reports of shootings, according to cybersecurity experts, law enforcement agencies and the group members' own posts in a social media chat." (Though the Times, couldn't verify the group's claims.)

> Federal authorities previously connected the same network to a series of bomb scares and bogus shooting reports in early 2024, for which three men pleaded guilty this year... Bragging about its recent activities, Purgatory said that it could arrange more swatting episodes for a fee.

USA Today [5]tries to quantify the reach of swatting :

> Estimated swatting incidents jumped from 400 in 2011 to more than 1,000 in 2019, [6]according to the Anti-Defamation League , which cited a former FBI agent whose expertise is in swatting. From January 2023 to June 2024 alone, [7]more than 800 instances of swatting were recorded at U.S. elementary, middle and high schools, according to the K-12 School Shootings Database, created by a University of Central Florida doctoral student in response to the Parkland High School shooting in 2018.tise is in swatting... David Riedman, a data scientist and creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, estimates that in 2023, [8]it cost $82,300,000 for police to respond to false threats.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader [9]schwit1 for sharing the news.



[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/swatting-hoaxes-on-college-campuses-spark-panic-and-an-fbi-probe/ar-AA1Lj4hP

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/interactive/school-shootings-database/

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/10/04/school-swatting-hoax-active-shooter/

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/30/us/school-shooting-hoax-universities-purgatory-swatting.html

[5] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/08/22/villanova-active-shooter-hoax-swatting-mass-panic/85768500007/

[6] https://www.adl.org/resources/article/what-swatting

[7] https://k12ssdb.org/swatting

[8] https://k12ssdb.substack.com/p/one-solution-to-swatting-hoaxes-is

[9] https://www.slashdot.org/~schwit1