Joshua Peters, a US Air Force vet who hangs out on Twitch playing video games, was the victim of a swatting hoax last week, during which his home was stormed and the police reportedly pointed guns at his brothers.
Streaming as Koopatroopa787, Peters had around 60,000 people watching him play Runescape when the raid took place. You can see the moment his mother tells him what’s going on in the video below.
“I see you posting my address”, Peters later says on his stream. “I had police point a gun at my little brothers because of you. They could have been shot, they could have died because you chose to SWAT my stream. I don’t give a s*** about what you have against me, or what I did to you. For that, I am at a loss for words. Your gripe is with me so let it be with me and do not involve my family in any way, shape or form with this. They don’t deserve that.”
Peters told ABC News (via Game Politics) that he wasn’t aware of anyone with a “beef” against him.
“It was more or less a wake-up call that I have to be careful. It can happen to anybody,” he said. “I came back on after and told everyone what was going on. I knew the person who did it was watching and I wanted to let them know you can’t do this.”
Comments
38 responses to “Guy Swatted In Front Of 60,000 Viewers While Playing Runescape”
Why are 60 000 people watching someone play Runescape?
More shocking than the Swat itself I say.
I was just thinking the same and doesn’t Ruenscape average around 10k viewers on twitch anyways?
Because he’s cute 😉
But he looks too old to be living at home with his mum and family!
I don’t know – he could have Benjamin Button’s disease or something. No judgement.
Why haven’t they found a way to punish the fuckwits who do this? Refuse to accept anonymous calls and severely punish anyone who makes a false report. This is beyond a joke.
You kinda can’t have non-anonymous calls to emergency numbers, lot’s of people would stop reporting crime because of being afraid of stuff.
“It was more or less a wake-up call that I have to be careful. It can happen to anybody,”
Not really.
I don’t stream or youtube, but if i did i would make sure there is no way of linking my alias to my real life identity.
Not rocket science.
It can happen to anybody, come on obviously he is talking about other streamers
And sorry, you can’t make sure no one knows your real life identity if you show your face online. You expect people to wear a mask and do streaming? People that watch the stream want to see his reaction, if it is just watching gameplay people will just watch youtube.
You can and you don’t need a mask.
Do you really think that you can just get a name and home address just like that? Just because they showed there face?
Think before you post something stupid.
It’s more than possible it was someone that knows him (and likely dislikes him) IRL. It’s not that easy or useful to keep what you do for work from people you know. It gets out.
So please think before you ironically call someone stupid.
Are you saying that out of 60,000 people one might not be someone he went to school with, someone may be someone he worked with. Someone from his town who has seen him go home. a neighbour? REALLY
You have got to be trolling. Because no one sir, is that stupid.. You even take stupid to the next level by suggesting the guy with common sense it the idiot.
It’s harder than it sounds. I’m obviously not going to stalk you, just bringing this up sounds creepy enough, but just by this account I can see your gamertag, PSN account and Steam account, as well as a little over a thousand comments you’ve made. In those comments I’m sure there’s something that could probably narrow at least your location down a little. Failing that I’m pretty confident that I could play Microsoft, Sony and Valve support off each other to get at least your real name.
I’m guessing he didn’t really think about it too much in the early days and he’s probably been using Koopatroopa787 handle since before Twitch was a thing. He wouldn’t have realised he was starting so he didn’t start with a clean slate. He probably eased into it over time starting like most with an insignificant hobby channel without ever having a ‘oh, I’m somewhat famous now, better audit my personal privacy’ moment.
The other thing is that if he’s attempting to do this professionally he’s probably registered with a bunch of organisations that don’t hesitate to give out your personal information. I assume like most Twitch streamers he has a PayPal account for donations, which means donate 0.01 cent and you either get his real name or a business name you can trace back to his real name.
It’s both harder and easier than it sounds. Even if you’re super careful about having separate emails and nicks for online services and never say anything that can be used to inference anything identifying about you or the things you do/use, you have to make sure that no one else does as well. Your less security conscious friends will most likely have no qualms about extolling your virtues or fails online in a way that can be linked to things you have said elsewhere.
If you’ve ever signed up for anything online you’ll have to hope that it never gets hacked either as most of that information ends up in publicly (or at least the places where the people most likely to misuse it live) available places. Even then, as you say, a lot of places have poor support procedures that can allow you to quite easily obtain access to someone’s account, even the big names as one poor guy found out.
Privacy on the internet is, as they say, more or less a myth and you should always act as though someone will know who you are.
But as i said:
No way of linking my alias to my real life identity.
There are other ways to do paypal without giving out your name.
And i still stand by what i said.
If you are careful enough, it won’t happen.
Him saying “wear a mask” made his comment stupid, implying that it easy to get details if you see a streamer’s face.
I don’t know if I’m missing something, but this seems distrubingly easy to do to someone. I would have thought it would take more than one anonynous phone call to call in a full on raid.
There’s a good little Vice segment on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ziLjOPCQwg
Apparently not in the U.S.
The majority of the time SWAT guys get sent out must be to Twitch steams now.
They tell the 911 operator exactly what they need to hear in order to justify a rapid response. They’ll say something like ‘I just saw this guy drag a crying/screaming woman into his house at gun point’. Even if the operator is 99% sure the person is lying they have to respond to that ASAP.
The thing is there’s nothing you can really do to stop it. If you start waiting for multiple reports, or forcing people to provide some sort of identification, you end up slowing down the response time so much that it’s pointless.
Yeah I figured as much, it still seems pretty crazy. Hopefully they manage to track down these assholes to chuck the book at them, so to speak.
They caught one guy yesterday, a real scumbag who who was making these calls into different states. When I heard about it, He looks exactly like what you’d expect.
Not really, with emergency calls they need to treat every call as being real. Its better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.
It just doesn’t help that in the US there is a high level of violent crime as well as a more militarised police force (due to a number of factors including the high level of gun ownership and excess hardware left over from two recent wars being sold to govt departments), which in turn means that SWAT call-outs are quite common.
On the up side, there have been cases of these idiots being arrested for doing this. Personally I would force them to pay every last cent it cost to deploy one of these SWAT teams, plus compensation for the poor person who was swatted.
In the US I believe you can do reverse look up of phone numbers to obtain home address, etc and its legal. In Aussieland its illegal to provide the service or use the service. So with a little social media snooping I am sure you could get enough info in a short time to be a total jerk to someone you don’t know.
It’s just the phone book. once you know someone’s name and city/suburb you can find their address if they’re in the phonebook.
There is that too. I’m guessing if you know full name and state its that easy. I was thinking if you only have partial info.
Are you thinking of ‘grey pages’ where you can find who belongs to a phone number (or address), even if you don’t know their name? Such a service is certainly illegal in Australia (don’t know about the States though). @moonhead is right if you know their name though.
Yes that’s the one.
It doesn’t.. It’s called swatting.. and its the new idiots planking.
I think the point we all need to rally behind (regardless of the game being played) is that it is a cowardly act. Putting players and their families in immediate danger. This is wrong and needs to be stamped out.
This is not a joke. This is people’s lives that are being gambled with.
I really hope whoever’s responsible gets caught like the other guy who’s facing 5yrs in jail.
Frankly, five years isn’t enough. These fuckers are deliberately trying to get people killed, they deserve a few years facing the same risk.
Well said. Perhaps they need to look at changing legislation… I wonder if swatting could even be classified as an act of terrorism?
terrorism, no, but if someone gets injured they can easily ne charged with attempted murder and if some is killed then first degree murder let alon every other charge that would be thrown on to the list to ensure a conviction ( and rightfully so)
“You can see the moment his mother tells him what’s going on in the video below.”
I don’t see a video.
Either they mean the gif or the video on the site reporting the incident.
As long as this stuff keeps getting attention people are going to keep swating people
one of these days, someone’s gonna get shot.
The comment with the most up-votes here is making a joke of the whole situation. No wonder this shit keeps happening to people.