MISSION, Kan. — About 50 college campuses across the United States in recent weeks received 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 a false alarm. Last week, 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 on edge.
In other cases, schools figured out early that something was amiss, but even then it took time and resources.
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The FBI is investigating, but so far there were no arrests.
Dispatch call centers often are the last lines of defense to swatters, a burden in an era of mass shootings.
“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.”
Baton Rouge Police block the entrance of Southern University’s campus Thursday in Baton Rouge, La., after a threat led to a lockdown.
Swatting calls are on the rise
The goal of swatting is to get authorities, particularly a SWAT team, to respond to an address.
Some of the earliest swats stemmed from online gaming disputes. Such incidents later were 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 such incidents, hundreds of law enforcement agencies voluntarily submitted thousands of incidents, the FBI said.
The problem is so prevalent, 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.
Purgatory, a group affiliated with The Com, a loose network of online threat actors, was linked to some 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.
U.S. Navy Security Forces stand Thursday at the entrance to Gate 1 at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis.
Spotting a swat
Last month at Kansas State University, 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.
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 from being made from behind virtual private networks would stop most swats, said Keven Hendricks, a cyber crime expert who teaches law enforcement about investigating swatting. He’s 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 about 120 miles 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 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.
The worry is that hoaxes will create complacency at campuses where active shooter alerts and drills became 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, 21, a senior journalism major who took cover after a recent threat at the University of Arkansas.
A list of deadly shootings on college campuses in the US
Dozens of patrol vehicles, including a forensics van, are stationed outside of Florida State University’s student union building April 17, 2025, in Tallahassee, Fla., after a shooting. Two people were killed and at least six others were wounded. The gun used in the shooting belonged to the 20-year-old suspect's mother, who has worked for the sheriff’s office for 18 years, authorities said. They described the gun as her former service weapon. Experts say mass shootings on college campuses, though rare, are often on the minds of students today because they grew up participating in active shooter drills in elementary and high school. Here is a look at other deadly shootings on U.S. college campuses in recent decades.
Michigan State University students embrace Feb. 14, 2023, at The Rock on the East Lansing, Mich., campus. A 43-year-old gunman fired inside an academic building and the student union, killing three students and injuring five others. He later killed himself miles away from the campus while being confronted by police. If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988. There is also an online chat at 988lifeline.org.
Amanda Perez, left, is comforted Dec. 6, 2023, by fellow student Alejandro Barron after a shooting on the University of Nevada campus in Las Vegas. A 67-year-old former business professor, whose applications to teach at UNLV were rejected, opened fire in the building housing the university's business school, killing three professors and badly wounding a fourth. The gunman was killed in a shootout with police outside the building.
A University of Virginia football player speaks Nov. 19, 2022, during a memorial service for three slain University of Virginia football players Lavel Davis Jr., D'Sean Perry and Devin Chandler at John Paul Jones Arena at the school in Charlottesville, Va. A student and former member of the school’s football team shot and killed the players on a charter bus as they returned from a field trip, setting off panic and a 12-hour lockdown of the campus until the suspect was captured. Two other students also were wounded on the campus. The shooter pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and other charges.
Authorities gather Oct. 9, 2015, outside a student dormitory in Flagstaff, Ariz., after an early morning fight between two groups of college students escalated into gunfire, authorities said. Just weeks into his freshman year, a student walked onto the Northern Arizona University campus in Flagstaff and opened fire. One student was killed and three others wounded. The shooter later pleaded guilty to manslaughter and aggravated assault and was sentenced to six years in prison.
Hannah Miles, a student at Umqua Community College, speaks with reporters Oct. 1, 2015, in Roseburg, Ore. A 26-year-old man opened fire on his writing class, killing his instructor and eight other people at the school, then killed himself. Miles said she was in the classroom next door to the shooting, which also wounded nine others.
