A 17-year-old hacker has pleaded guilty to a total of 23 charges of public mischief, extortion, criminal harassment and false police reports, with his targets mostly young female gamers.
The teenager from British Columbia, whose name is not allowed to be revealed due to being a minor, victimized female gamers that resisted his advances and rejected his friend requests on the popular online game League of Legends.
The hacker shut down Internet access for some of his targets, along with uploading their personal information and calling them over and over again.
The Tri-City News reported that the hacker would call police and say that he had a family in hostage, possesses napalm bombs or murdered a person, at times with ransom demands. This was done to force the authorities to send SWAT teams to the homes of his targets.
The practice, which has been named "swatting," has alarmingly grown within the online gaming community, with targets mostly those that are on live stream during their gaming sessions. Apparently, it is funny to see SWAT teams barge into gamers while doing their live stream sessions.
The hacker posted about the pranks on his social media accounts, bragging about them and at most times even streaming himself while he was carrying them out.
The most notable case where the teenager was involved is when he victimized a woman from Arizona, who dropped out from the University of Arizona after she and her parents received threats. The teenage hacker then called the authorities and claimed that he had killed his parents using a rifle, held bombs in possession, and will kill officers that he would see.
The teenager's call brought a SWAT team to the home of the woman. Five days later, the hacker pulled the same prank while the woman's mother was there to visit. He also did it at the home of the woman's parents, where the woman's brother and father were dragged out of their house at gunpoint.
The hacker continued by posting the credit card information of the parents of the woman online, sending his target over 200 text messages simultaneously and hacking into the victim's accounts for Twitter and email.
Another incident involving the teenager was a live stream that ran for eight hours, where he was shown swatting and harassing a target in Ohio. People that saw the live stream alerted the authorities.
The hacker was then arrested after several incidents of swatting from September to December were traced to him. He was already well known among Canadian authorities, as the teenager was already under probation in Canada for similar crimes. He was reportedly part of the Lizard Squad, a group of hackers that gained fame for their repeated takedowns of the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live.
