Waves of fake threats to colleges are putting students on edge and
testing dispatchers
[September 13, 2025]
By HEATHER HOLLINGSWORTH and ANDREW DEMILLO
MISSION, Kan. (AP) — Around 50 college campuses across the country have
been deluged in recent weeks with hoax calls about armed gunmen and
other violence, laying bare the challenges of detecting fake threats
quickly to prevent mass panic.
Students at some schools spent hours hiding under desks, only to find
out later it was someone’s idea of a entertainment. On Thursday, several
historically Black colleges locked down or canceled classes after
receiving threats, at a time when the fatal shooting of conservative
activist Charlie Kirk at a Utah college had campuses newly on edge.
In other cases, schools figured out early that something was amiss, but
even then it took time and resources.
The FBI is investigating, but so far there have been no arrests.
Dispatch call centers often are the last lines of defense to swatters, a
burden in an era of mass shootings, including one this week at a
suburban Denver high school and another two weeks ago at a Catholic
church in Minneapolis that killed two schoolchildren and injured 21
people.
“We have so many mass shootings in this country and so many young people
die,” said Wendy Via, co-founder and CEO of the Global Project Against
Hate and Extremism. “And so you can’t just blow it off because there has
been a bunch of hoaxes.”
Swatting calls are on the rise
The goal of swatting is to get authorities, particularly a SWAT team, to
respond to an address and has roots in fake bomb threats that have been
around for decades.
Some of the earliest swats stemmed from online gaming disputes. But
gradually they became connected to nihilistic groups, which often
conduct the calls in mass batches, trading tips in online forums on how
to avoid detection.
The FBI said swatting is on the rise. Since a center was created in 2023
to gather details on swatting incidents, hundreds of law enforcement
agencies have voluntarily submitted thousands of incidents, the FBI
said.
Swatting has become so prevalent that the U.S. Department of Education
offered guidance on how to spot hoax calls. Clues include if the caller
can’t answer follow-up questions about their phone number or current
location, or mispronounces names.
Some swats linked to the group Purgatory
Purgatory, a group affiliated with The Com, which is a loose network of
online threat actors, has been linked to some of the recent swats,
according to reports from the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism,
an Alabama-based nonprofit that tracks extremist groups online, and the
nonprofit Center for Internet Security and Institute for Strategic
Dialogue. The FBI declined to comment on the reports.
On more than two hours of livestreams captured by the nonprofits and
provided to The Associated Press, the caller’s friends can be heard in
the background laughing, belching and taking breaks to rap.
Keven Hendricks, a cyber crime expert who teaches law enforcement about
investigating swatting, said the calls “shake your faith”
“We want there to be a reason they were doing it,” he said. “And they
were doing it for the LOLs.”
Spotting a swat
One swatting attempt last month at Kansas State University serves as a
case study of sorts on spotting a swat.
There were clues from the start that something was amiss. The first red
flag was that it wasn't a 911 call, said Major Daryl Ascher, of the
Riley County Police Department. Police declined to provide their own
recording of the call, but Ascher confirmed many of the details.
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Baton Rouge Police block the entrance of Southern University's
campus at the corner of Harding Boulevard and Scenic Highway,
Thursday, Sept. 11, 2025, after a threat led administers to announce
a lockdown, in Baton Rouge, La. (Javier Gallegos/The Advocate via
AP)
Emergency calls are geolocated, meaning someone calling 911 outside
the targeted area won’t get through because it will be directed to
the dispatch center closest to their location. Swatters instead
resort to calling non-emergency police numbers.
“That should be a dead giveaway,” said Don Beeler, chief executive
officer of TDR Technology Solutions, which tracks swatting calls and
offers technology to prevent them. “You're not going to look it up
if you are in an emergency. That's just not how the human brain
works.”
He said that if its system detects a suspicious call like that, it
is transferred to an automated recording that tells the caller to
hang up and dial 911.
On the technical side, halting calls made using voice over internet
protocol technology, or VoIP, from being made from behind virtual
private networks would stop most swats, said Hendricks, who has been
swatted himself.
Dispatchers look for clues
The next clue was that the swatter got the Manhattan, Kansas,
school’s name slightly wrong, calling it Kansas City State
University, referencing a city around 120 miles (193 kilometers)
away.
“Obviously, if you were from Manhattan or attending a university,
you would know the name of the university,” Ascher said.
As a giggling throng listened on messaging platform Telegram, the
swatter then described a man armed with an AR-15 prowling the
university’s library, a description that was nearly identical to the
calls flooding other university towns. The gunfire that peppered the
call also was a tip-off because it “sounded like it was from a TV,"
Ascher said.
On the livestream, the clearly skeptical dispatcher asked why the
caller couldn't see the purported gunman when the shots sounded so
close to him and why other 911 calls weren't flooding in.
“I’m not sure ma’am. I’m not sure if they have a phone or not,” the
caller answered.
Officers still were dispatched to the library. Ascher provided no
details on how many or their tactics, but said dispatchers kept them
informed of the potential it was a hoax.
“I often wonder if people don’t have something better to do,” Ascher
said, pausing. “It is just very taxing on law enforcement.”
It's also been taxing on students.
The worry is that hoaxes will create complacency at campuses where
active shooter alerts and drills have become a regular part of life.
“I hope we’re not desensitized enough to this enough to the point
where we don’t take these alerts seriously anymore,” said Miceala
Morano, a 21-year-old senior journalism major, who took cover after
a recent threat at the University of Arkansas. “Unfortunately, it
still is a very real possibility.”
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DeMillo reported from Little Rock, Arkansas
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