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Not so much - as the article notes the police still visit and sweep the place, they just don't arrive with guns drawn, and they even send plain clothes police instead of SWAT teams.

My question, though: what makes someone likely to be swatted? Is it their online expression of an opinion? Membership of a certain online sub-culture? A high real-life profile?

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It seems to happen often to streamers and people in the computer security community (Krebs, fb exec, mudge).

>mudge

Preettty sure that was just a misguided welfare check incorrectly described as a "swatting".

See context: https://twitter.com/dotMudge/status/1211043309973622784

Odds are someone was worried about him after his tweet, not that someone called the police and pretended to have hostages at his address.

It's certainly never appropriate in the US to call the cops if you think that someone might be suicidal, but I don't think it'd be entirely inappropriate to be concerned by his initial tweet.

I don't know what happened with mudge, but "welfare checks" where the person calling has ulterior motives for involving the cops in a situation are a common thing as well.

Live streamers are perfect targets for swatters because they even stream the swatting itself..

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