YouTuber DarkSydePhil faced a police SWAT team during a Twitch Interactive, Inc. livestream in what is a continuing trend of would-be pranksters making false police reports of violent crimes occurring at livestreamers’ residences.

Phil Burnell, better known as DarkSydePhil on YouTube, could be heard telling his girlfriend to hold her hands up while he responded to a SWAT team assembled outside his home. As a previous victim of doxing—when a person’s personal information is released on the Internet maliciously—Burnell had already warned authorities that he might become the victim of swatting. So, when police arrived at his house due to a report of an incident phoned in, they investigated first.

In a swatting, a malicious individual calls in a threatening situation to the police often claiming hostages or gunfire. As a result, police arrive with SWAT prepared to deal with a potentially violent criminal. Of course, the police instead discover a gamer, wearing headphones (and thus may not hear the police knocking), who is surprised by drawn weapons.

The activity of calling a SWAT team to someone’s house is presented as a prank by the perpetrators, but it can be extremely dangerous for everyone involved.

In 2013, popular Twitch streamer Whiteboy7thst had a SWAT team arrive at his house, which ended him arrested for a personal stash of 30-500 grams of pot (found during the search extenuating from the false police report). During 2014, Internet DDoS trolls DerpTrolling began targeting Twitch streamers and one victim, PhantomL0rd, found his home raided. He reported on Twitter that an automatic weapon had been pointed at him, then he was handcuffed and placed in a police cruiser while police searched his home.

The aftermath of SWATTING

The ordeal has extended from just Burnell to his family as he said in a tweet that false police reports had also hit his girlfriend’s father.

Whomever SWATed us yesterday is now SWATing our families, Leanna’s dad just got it and we’ve pretty much notified everybody else

— Phil (@TheyCallMeDSP) June 25, 2015

Burnell has produced a video about his swatting experience, but he has decided not to do one talking about those targeting his family–

FYI as frustrating/upsetting as it is, I’m not going to make a vid on the latest SWATing. It’s what the criminal wants so…nope.

— Phil (@TheyCallMeDSP) June 25, 2015

–and he produced a video explaining what DDoS is, how it affects livestreamers, and added tips on how to avoid/mitigate it. As distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are often correlated with swatting pranks—see what happened with DerpTrolling above—and are a more common problem for popular streamers it could be a very useful resource.

During the video, Burnell mentions that DDoS attacks have become far less sophisticated over the years. In fact, DDoS-for-hire sites, known as “booters” by security professionals, have become popularized. Even the well-known Internet mayhem crew LizardSquad has publicly marketed a DDoS-for-hire site called the Lizard Stresser.

Skip to approximately the 15 minute mark for the video to begin.

According to Burnell, the police reported to him that the person who called in the false tip is known. This could mean that the individual, who committed a crime with making a false police report, may be brought to justice. It is not common for swatting perpetrators to be caught as many use VOIP service, VPNs, and anonymizing proxies to make the tip—and many do so from countries from outside the United States.

Photo credit: Phil Burnell, aka DarkSydePhil on YouTube.