Web of Make Believe: Death, Lies and the Internet

Okay, we're recording.

All right.

So, maybe the best place to start is,

how did you get involved in this?

I was in an argument with someone that

most people would consider a hacker.

I was reading the texts on my phone,

and I guess I said something that kind of, I have to assume,

like, insulted his pride or his ego or something.

And this person sent the SWAT team to my house at midnight.

When I looked out my window, I noticed it was really bright outside,

like, really bright.

So then I walked out my room and opened the front door.

And it... I looked up in the sky and there was a helicopter.

The light was so bright that it was...

It seemed like it was mid-afternoon, that's how bright the light was.

Then shortly after, cop cars started pulling up,

and they were getting out with shotguns and rifles.

It was an eye-opening experience

that... that he could do that to my house over nothing,

, 'cause it was a hoax call. Whatever he said, wasn't true.

He said that someone was being held hostage in the closet.

I learned later that he even pretended to be

the girl that was allegedly being held hostage in my closet.

I wasn't scared for my life.

I didn't feel like I was gonna die or anything.

I just thought it was cool that he could do that.

You thought it was cool.

That's what I thought about that experience.

Quite frankly, I was thinking, "Holy shit."

"This guy actually just sent the SWAT team to my house,

and he's not worried at all about the consequences."

This call is from a federal prison.

Now, if you've never heard of swatting...

Honestly, I hadn't until this story happened.

I've got two people here held hostage, all right?

It's when someone makes a prank call about a bogus crime

to get the SWAT team to go to someone's house.

An army of Nassau County SWAT teams

descended on a home, guns drawn.

They thought they were responding to a double-murder,

and a suspect who had barricaded himself in the home.

Police department search warrant!

- -

But it all turned out to be a hoax.

Down! Get on the ground!

The swatting targets are sometimes celebrities

like Rihanna and Justin Bieber,

but are often online gamers.

People making the false 911 calls and then watch live online.

Swatting started as a way to, I think,

disrupt gaming competitions.

Or if they lose an important match, to get back at somebody else.

It goes back more than 20 years.

People playing a video game,

they call the police and mimic the person that they lost to,

and say that they've killed family members

and they see how many people they can get to come down.

I come out of my room, they got guns pointed at me.

I'm like, "Oh my God, I'm gonna die."

A lot of the people involved in swatting

are doing this to somebody gaming online

and a whole bunch of people all over the world are watching it live.

You could tell them. You could tell them, actually.

It's not funny and it's like...

The takeaways is one thing,

but this is, like, police who are saving lives.

- Um... - A waste of police time, whoever did it.

Being able to send the police to kick in someone's door

while this is all on camera,

kind of ups the ante.

People who perpetrate this are looking for bomb dogs, helicopters.

That's all part of the "fun."

Each swatting incident costs law enforcement on average $10,000.

It's about being feared.

It's about being known.

Making the world acknowledge your presence.

For a lot of these individuals, any attention is good attention.

Somebody cares enough about me to send the SWAT team to my house?

I must be important.

But the FBI's biggest concern, that one day,

these criminal crank calls will turn deadly.

Shh, shh.

And then we'll change her face, hair, and clothing.

Let's go with Gigi, 'cause that's easy.

We'll do a random last name.

I play video games 'cause it's fun for me.

You can be really creative with it sometimes.

Oh my gosh. She looks crazy.

Look at her legs.

What kind of power workouts are you doing?

I deal with anxiety and stuff like that.

When you have anxiety, you tend to like revert in yourself

and do things that feel better for you.

And this feels better for me sometimes.

Ooh, where should we go?

Prettier houses in Oasis Springs.

It starts off as, you know,

you not wanting to deal with real life.

You get validation from the game,

and, at some point it becomes addictive.

You wanna get that validation over and over again.

Look, my neighbors are coming to visit me,

which is not something that happens in real life.

If real life isn't making me feel good and this is,

I'm gonna play this and spend a majority of my time doing this.

Okay, this is Tyler, and it's Christmas Day.

Really, the reason I started gaming was my friend, Tyler.

And I just got something on camera that was... kind of entertaining.

We met when I was in the seventh grade,

he taught me how to play games.

He was the first boyfriend I ever had.

He delved into the gaming community,

and didn't really get outside of the house.

His father died when he was younger.

His mother, she moved to Vegas and they lost contact.

His grandmother, I know her as his mom,

that's what he called her.

But he wasn't the same online as he was in person.

Playing Halo, the Xbox game,

became the most important thing in Tyler's life at a very young age.

He had aspirations of becoming a professional Halo player.

People who are good at this,

their name can be widely known very quickly.

There are competitions all over the world

where people who basically do nothing

but play a specific game or set of games,

come together and compete against each other.

If he can continue to hold this down for just a couple more seconds,

a perfect kill for Royal2.

And that's gonna do it, folks! They are the Halo world champions.

The top prizes for these can be just astronomical.

Endorsements, that kind of thing.

You're gonna sit there behind your mother's computer screen...

You ain't got shit to say, bitch!

There is coarseness to gaming culture.

You dumb cunt.

Learn how to play a proper character, you fucking stupid whore.

There is a treatment of others, even that are friends,

that can be quite harsh.

- Shut the fuck up... - Shut the fuck up piece of shit!

Slight infractions invite retaliation, name-calling.

Real harassment and abuse can be part of this.

In the gaming culture that Tyler belonged to,

to be extreme is something that's welcomed and invited.

And extreme is also included with fun.

Shut the fuck up!

These Halo acquaintances he had were really his closest friends.

Tyler Barriss was raised by Halo in many ways.

Tell me about how you got into this.

Like, what was your first bomb threat?

My first bomb threat

or the first time I sent a SWAT team to someone's house?

Yeah, I assume the bomb threats came first, right?

Yeah, that was the first thing I ever tried was evacuating a building.

The same person who swatted me sent the bomb squad to a school.

The first thing that I wanted to try to do was make headlines like that.

I tried evacuating a college university.

That was the first thing that I ever tried to evacuate

and it was on the news the same day.

At that point, I knew, "Okay, since that worked, this is legit."

Like, I could probably do this to any location in the United States.

It'll get evacuated as long as the call sounds believable.

Wherever I do this is going to get evacuated.

So, Tyler starts to swat other people in the Halo community.

But not only that, starts making lots of bomb threat calls

to high schools and junior highs.

He would call up and say, "I've hidden a bomb in a locker."

And, of course, they had to close the school.

I had gone on a spree of evacuating high schools,

and I was just making it quite obvious on my Twitter

that I'm evacuating numerous schools around the country.

And I have the ability to do this. And then I wanted to...

This is a time in which there's a lot of school shootings.

Did that factor into your thinking?

I wasn't... It had nothing to do with school shootings.

I was saying there's bombs in the school, they're going to detonate.

I never tried to do no school shooting script or anything like that.

But people are on edge

because there are so many school shootings around the country.

Did that factor into your thinking?

That wasn't... that didn't make me think I was going to have

any more success in having something evacuated.

It wasn't a relevant factor in my mind.

It's the fact that I knew I was breaking the law

and I could get away with it.

And there was nothing they could do to stop me.

I could keep doing it.