SAMMAMISH, Wash., Nov. 7 (UPI) -- Police in Washington deployed emergency vehicles and a helicopter to the home of an executive for video game developer Bungee after an anonymous prankster claimed to be holding the executive and his family hostage. The threats were a hoax, an increasingly common occurrence in the gaming community known as "swatting."
The actual SWAT team was placed on active standby while police responded to the fake crisis.
"The caller said he had an assault rifle and he had placed explosives in the yard and he was holding a family hostage," Nathan Elledge, chief of police at the Sammamish Police Department, told KOMO news.
"He wanted $20,000 to release the family."
Authorities are unsure who placed the call, but suspect it may be someone connected to the video game industry.
"Maybe a contractor for his work or someone at his work who didn't have a great experience with him," Houck described.
Swatting is not a new manifestation of gamer culture. In August, a Colorado SWAT team was deployed to the home of an an unsuspecting gamer in Littleton, who "knew almost right away what exactly was happening."
Stephen Toulouse, former head of Xbox Live's privacy and enforcement department, said he struggled for years to get police to treat swatting as an alarming trend, but it was not until the prank was pulled on Justin Beieber authorities began to persue criminal charges.
"The swatting thing, only now that Justin Bieber gets swatted, do prosecutors go, 'Oh, we should probably do something about this,'" Toulouse said in a 2013 interview with industry news outlet Polygon.
"I couldn't get the Seattle police interested to save their lives, in prosecuting the kids who were doing this. I'm like, 'Come on, guys, they're sending your SWAT team out. What if you shot somebody. Don't you have an interest in going after these kids?' And they're like, 'No, because they are kids and at the end of the day it will be a juvenile sentence in juvenile court and that doesn't give prosecutors headlines.'"
