Screenshot/Twitch – @LosPollosTV
- On Wednesday, LosPollosTV appeared to be raided by a SWAT team during a Twitch live stream.
- "Swatting" is when a person "prank" calls the police and falsely claims that someone is dangerous.
- Swatting has a long history in the streaming community.
- Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.
On Wednesday, a special weapons and tactics (SWAT) team appeared to raid the New Jersey home of LosPollosTV, a Twitch gaming streamer with nearly 600,000 followers.
Louis Sammartino, the man behind LosPollosTV, said that he was "swatted" during a live stream. Swatting is an online trend in which someone calls the police to falsely allege a person is dangerous in some way – that they're a murderer or kidnapper or they have a bomb, among other things – which usually leads the police to send a SWAT team rather than ordinary officers.
As Insider previously reported, swatting has been happening for years and has resulted in injuries and deaths, though SWAT teams usually leave the victim's house shortly after arriving. Insider also reported that swatting is a particularly common incident in the live streaming community, partly because the swatter gets to watch the streamer deal with the SWAT team live on camera.
Sammartino, who did not respond to a request for comment, was livestreaming Fortnite when a SWAT team appeared to enter his home. On camera, officers walked into his recording space while shining flashlights around and scanning the area. One person appeared to hold a riot shield. As it was happening, viewers spammed "WTF" messages in the chat.
Sammartino then returned to the live stream and said that he had just been swatted. "I'm a little rattled," he said. "I don't know what you guys saw, what happened… [someone] literally swatted my house."
The gaming news website GamingBible reported that no one was injured in the raid. Insider could not identify the police department that responded to the alleged call.
After the incident on Wednesday, Sammartino tweeted, "Smh," which has garnered over 7,000 likes.
YouTubers and streamers have faced fake SWAT threats for years. In June, the massively popular Twitch star xQcOW, who has 6 million followers on the platform, alleged that he was swatted so regularly that he had to move houses from Texas to Canada, where he was originally from.
"Almost every day the police came to our house with the full squad," he said in a June live stream. "I was genuinely scared that I was going to die… It didn't make sense to me, and I just got so scared I just wanted to go home."
In 2015, swatting, or "using false communications with the intent to create an emergency response, and for other purposes," became a federal crime in the US.
To read more stories like this, check out Insider's digital-culture coverage here.