Swatting as Hybrid Warfare: The Rise of ‘Purgatory’ and the Weaponization of False Active Shooter Alerts on U.S. Campuses

Active Shooter
Written By Matt Helmkamp

Executive Summary

A surge of coordinated false active shooter calls across U.S. university campuses in August 2025 has been linked to a decentralized online group known as “Purgatory,” part of the broader and dangerous “Com” network. These swatting campaigns represent a convergence of cybercrime, psychological terrorism, and digital performance—designed to terrify, overwhelm emergency systems, and gain notoriety. Law enforcement agencies face significant challenges in countering these increasingly professionalized and ideologically ambiguous threat actors.

Key Judgments

Key Judgment 1

The August 2025 wave of campus swatting incidents represents a coordinated psychological operation rather than isolated pranks.

Evidence: Over a dozen universities were hit within days, following a consistent script—fictitious reports of armed gunmen, background gunfire, and staged panic, often streamed or recorded by perpetrators. Groups like “Purgatory” and “Diddy Swats” claimed responsibility in real time via chat apps and Telegram.

Key Judgment 2

Swatting has evolved into a monetized criminal service, with groups offering “violence-as-a-service” packages for clients seeking to harass or terrorize individuals or institutions.

Evidence: Telegram posts linked to Purgatory advertised prices for hoax calls targeting schools ($20) and even brick-and-mortar vandalism. Members of the Com network have offered swatting, arson, and extortion services for hire, and several have been federally indicted.

Key Judgment 3

Technological anonymity tools—such as VoIP spoofing and Discord streaming—allow perpetrators to evade detection, making rapid response and deterrence extremely difficult for law enforcement.

Evidence: Swatters used Voice over IP calls with realistic background audio (including fake gunshots) to deceive 911 dispatchers. The University of Tennessee and Villanova hoaxes were orchestrated live to an online audience by users like “Gores,” while federal cases revealed multi-state coordination using anonymized tools.

Key Judgment 4

The swatting epidemic is undermining public trust in emergency systems and inflicting cascading psychological and institutional harm across American campuses.

Evidence: GPAHE, Argentino, and DHS-linked researchers describe swatting as an attack on “social infrastructure.” The repeated false alarms lead to alert fatigue, eroded trust in emergency notifications, delayed responses to real threats, and trauma in students already sensitized by the reality of mass shootings.

Key Judgment 5

Existing legal frameworks, enforcement structures, and emergency protocols are insufficient for addressing swatting as a form of hybrid threat.

Evidence: Despite the FBI’s 2023 National Common Operational Picture system and ongoing prosecutions, many perpetrators—often minors—face inconsistent sentences or evade detection entirely. Experts describe current deterrents as reactive and fragmented compared to the scale and sophistication of the threat.

Analysis

The recent string of false active shooter alerts across U.S. college campuses has revealed the terrifying maturity of swatting as a cyber-physical weapon. Spearheaded by decentralized online groups like Purgatory, these hoaxes now mirror the logic of terrorist operations: targeting civilian populations with fear, testing state responses, and feeding attention economies through spectacle.

On August 21, 2025, coordinated false reports at Villanova University and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga sparked lockdowns, law enforcement mobilization, and mass panic. Similar incidents followed at institutions including Iowa State, Northern Arizona, Kansas State, and the University of South Carolina. The attacks were not spontaneous. They were streamed live by members of Purgatory, whose leader, using the alias “Gores,” made fake calls using spoofed VoIP lines while Discord audiences laughed in real time. Their aim was clear: provoke terror, cause disruption, and gain notoriety.

This form of digital terror is highly adaptive. With the proliferation of VoIP services, anonymizing technologies, and encrypted chat platforms, perpetrators operate across jurisdictions, evade identification, and broadcast their crimes for entertainment. These tactics mirror the structure of decentralized extremist networks but with a distinct shift—ideology is often secondary to spectacle. The focus is not persuasion, but disruption.

Swatting is now also a business. “Purgatory” and its affiliated networks monetize violence by offering crime-for-hire packages. Screenshots show price lists for hoax shootings and vandalism, creating a transactional model of harm. The original founder of Purgatory, Evan Strauss, has already pleaded guilty to orchestrating multi-state swatting, arson, and bomb threats. Yet new cells and imitators are proliferating, emboldened by visibility and digital clout.

The effects of these attacks go beyond the incident. Emergency systems are flooded. Students relive mass shooting fears. Institutional responses are slowed by alert fatigue. Each false flag erodes public trust in warning systems. As noted by researchers like Marc-André Argentino and the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, swatting is functioning as a form of psychological infrastructure sabotage. It’s not simply the fear of violence—it’s the normalization of it.

Perhaps most disturbing is the youth of those involved. Many participants in The Com, including Purgatory, are minors. Their crimes—ranging from swatting and doxxing to child exploitation and extortion—are committed for clout, not ideology. The gamified nature of the subculture rewards chaos and cruelty. As federal indictments have shown, members used scripts, coordination platforms, and shared targets to maximize response and media coverage.

The traditional tools of law enforcement—warrants, jurisdiction, patrol response—are ill-suited to address this evolution. These crimes are borderless, platform-based, and often live-streamed before authorities can verify the threat. While federal prosecutors have begun cracking down, gaps remain: sentencing inconsistencies, lack of centralized enforcement, and limited cyber monitoring capabilities mean the threat is far from neutralized.

Swatting, once a niche cyber prank, has now become a form of hybrid warfare. It targets perception, not just physical space. As school shootings continue to haunt American consciousness, these hoaxes exploit real trauma and turn it into digital performance. Until legal, technological, and cultural responses catch up, the next wave of fake calls—and the real harm they cause—is already being planned.

Sources

Matt Helmkamp
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