Hoaxers increasingly going online to threaten schools

An anonymous email sent in December threatened El Capitan High School with a bomb and school officials sent students home for the day as authorities investigated.

Investigators eventually concluded the threat was bogus.

Police responded by sending out its bomb squad, and an investigation revealed the threat was linked to foreign countries and was sent through an Internet server that protects against “traffic analysis.” The threat was submitted through the school’s website, which doesn’t require a valid email address to send messages.

Security experts, law enforcement authorities and school officials identified what appears to be an emerging trend around the nation: hoaxers using proxy servers, virtual private networks and other high-tech identity-disguising tools to anonymously threaten schools online and trigger a huge police response.

The El Capitan threat came just two months after a Livingston teenager made a similar threat to the high school there in a telephone message. School staff members recognized the voice of the student, who confessed to law enforcement in a rare ending to such a case.

In December, Los Angeles, New York City and several other school systems received an email warning of a grisly attack. In late January, districts in Delaware, Virginia, Massachusetts, New Jersey and elsewhere received bomb threats phoned in using an electronic voice. No arrests have been made in those cases.

In almost every instance, the threats disrupted school for thousands of students, faculty and administrators. Schools were closed or locked down. Police and search dogs scoured buildings for intruders and bombs before concluding the threats were hoaxes.

“These are time-consuming and complex investigations,” said Fred Ryan, police chief in Arlington, Mass., whose department is investigating one of the robotic-voice threats received last month. “We’re all comparing notes.”

After the El Capitan incident, Merced County Sheriff Vern Warnke said investigators don’t take any threat lightly.

Ralph Calderon, an assistant superintendent for the Merced Union High School District, said though technology and recent terror attacks have caused society to become “hypersensitive,” student safety remains a priority.

“If we do have safety plans in place and protocols, it doesn’t help if we’re relaxed in our vigilance,” Calderon said. “We don’t know when or if any of these things are going to occur. We’re in a permanent state of ‘Code Yellow.’ That’s the way we need to operate.”

A number of school threats received over the past year are a variant of “swatting,” a practice that began around 2007: A caller falsely reports a crime in progress at an address, causing police cars and SWAT teams to rush to the scene, weapons drawn. Victims of swatting have included celebrities such as Justin Bieber as well as online gamers targeted by rival players.

Increasingly, swatting-type attacks have focused on places such as schools. The goal is to get heavy media attention, said Jonathan Fairtlough of the security consulting firm Knoll. In many cases, the perpetrator has no direct connection to the schools threatened. At least three suspects arrested over the last year were gamers who met online.

Because the El Capitan threat couldn’t be traced, investigators couldn’t determine if the threat was “swatting,” but Merced police Capt. Matt Williams said “swatting” was new to him.

“We don’t know if it was someone pulling a prank who thought it would be funny,” Williams said. “I never thought of gamers. I didn’t know people would do these things to earn points.”

Fairtlough described most swatting perpetrators as juveniles who are “highly intelligent, socially poorly adjusted.”

Law enforcement authorities fear a swatting episode could turn tragic, with armed officers rushing in. What also troubles investigators: The same technology used by 14-year-old boys conspiring on Xbox could be appealing to terrorists who might be planning real attacks and want to test how local authorities respond.

No statistics are kept at the federal level to show whether the number of school threats nationwide has increased, though individual school districts and police departments have reported more.

Though the hoaxes rarely lead to federal charges, the FBI increasingly is involved, in part because they often involve multiple districts across a wide region or someone making threats from out of state or another country.

The FBI and local police agencies have released little information about some of the recent cases. But court records in the small number of federal cases resulting in arrests shed some light on the perpetrators’ possible motives and what law enforcement did to trace the threats.

Matthew Tollis, 23, of Wethersfield, Conn., pleaded guilty last year to conspiring with other Xbox Live players in making threats against five schools. In a letter to a judge, he described how he turned to a group of online friends for protection after being a victim of threats himself.

When those friends began calling in hoax threats, he felt obligated to participate, he said.

This story was originally published February 8, 2016 at 4:12 PM with the headline "Hoaxers increasingly going online to threaten schools."