Swatting is when someone falsely reports a violent incident to the police at a target address. The police respond in force to scare and embarrass the victim. James Andrew McCarty (Aspertaine) and Kya Christian Nelson (Chumlul) would use the hacked Ring devices to live stream the footage of the police raiding the target homes. In an unsealed indictment released this week, the two were charged with swatting over a dozen victims in one week during November 2020: “The defendants then allegedly accessed without authorization the victims’ Ring devices and transmitted the audio and video from those devices on social media during the police response,” explains a statement from Martin Estrada, the U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California. “They also allegedly verbally taunted responding police officers and victims through the Ring devices during several of the incidents.”
Punishment
McCarty would continue swatting Ring camera owners into 2021, including call bomb threats and hostage situations over 20 times. He was arrested last week and has been charged with conspiracy to intentionally access computers without authorization. As for Nelson, he is already incarcerated in Kentucky for an unrelated incident and has also been charged. If found guilty on all charges, the pair will face a statutory maximum sentence of five years in federal prison on the conspiracy charge. The charge of intentionally accessing a computer without permission also carries a five-year max sentence. Tip of the day: After years of hefting a laptop around, you inevitably build up a menagerie of Wi-Fi networks. For the most part, they’ll sit on your PC, hardly used, but at times a change in configuration can make it difficult to connect to a network your computer already remembers. At this point, it can be beneficial to make Windows forget a Wi-Fi network and delete its network profile.
