I’d even go a step further and charge them with something criminal. Reckless endangerment if nothing else. The cost of the call itself is only a small part of it; the intent is to cause fear or harm to the individual being targeted, and they should be liable for that.

I work in 911 dispatch, the area I work in has gotten a few attempted swatting calls, and they usually tend to come from various free calling apps, or burner phones, and I think even a handful of times from payphones (yes, there’s still a few out there) which can make it really damn hard to tie them back to an actual person the way we can with most regular phone numbers. They also tend to call our 10-digit non-emergency numbers instead of 911, so we don’t get an address or location info for the caller like we would on a 911 line.

For what it’s worth, the cops in my area have done a really good job of not going nuts when they respond to these calls, and not to toot my own horn too hard, but I think a lot of that has to do with the quality of the dispatchers at my center, every time we’ve gotten one, whoever took the call pretty much immediately caught on that something was fucky and notated the hell out of every strange thing about the call to make sure the cops knew something may be up. One of the first swatting calls I remember seeing back when they started taking off a few years ago was answered by a somewhat older dude who had never even heard of swatting at that point, and he still caught on pretty quick that something was fishy. There’s other dispatch centers I’ve dealt with where I absolutely would not trust them to catch on or handle it well.

Sounds like change we can believe in.

Damn. That’s just nuts. Thanks for sharing this experience as I’ve never heard of this. I don’t own a boat, but they can apply that to anything unless I am rich.

I’m sorry you had to go through that, one of my experiences with them is getting hit by a car while cycling breaking some important bones, they showed up and gave me a business card to call them while I was laying on the ground bleeding from everywhere offering no help other than asking if I could walk to the hospital several blocks away. The EMTs chased them away thankfully. Then 8 months later they finally finished typing their whole one paragraph “police report” for my insurance claim, getting every detail wrong. A random shooter guy shot at me and missed this past November while I was out in my neighborhood walking my dog, in a different City, I found his name and all details about him to give the police. They still haven’t arrested him because he didn’t actually hit me while shooting at my head and can’t be bothered to “do their jobs”