After a swatting — recovery steps
A swatting is a violent crime against you, your family, and the responding officers. Treat it like one.
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This page is for someone who's been swatted in the last 72 hours and needs an action checklist. If you're in immediate physical danger or you're injured, get medical care and law enforcement support first.
Steps in order
1. Get safe. Confirm everyone is physically safe — you, your family, your pets, the responding officers. If anyone needs medical attention, that's the priority.
2. File a formal report on the swatting itself. The responding officers will document the call. Make sure a separate criminal report is filed naming you as the victim of a false police report (which is a crime in most jurisdictions) and any threats made through the call. The report creates the paper trail for federal charges if the swatter is identified.
3. Notify your department or chain of command. Even if you're a cop. Especially if you're a cop. They should know to flag your address with dispatch for any future calls — a confirmation requirement before another SWAT deployment.
4. Lock down the family. Tell your spouse, your kids' school, your parents. Schools should know to flag unfamiliar callers and pickups. Family should know to not engage with unknown contacts on social media. Change door locks if anything was forced.
5. Document everything for follow-up. The 911 call recording, dispatch records, any social media activity that referenced you in the hours before. Federal prosecutors have started taking swatting cases more seriously, but they need evidence to work with.
6. Remove the underlying data. The swatter found your address somewhere — usually a broker page. We handle that. Standard opt-outs across 200+ broker sites for you and the entire household, re-checked every two weeks. The swatting being over doesn't matter if the broker page that fed it is still live for the next swatter.
What we sweep that prevents the chain (next time)
You're statistically more likely to be swatted again if you've been swatted once. Continuous broker cleanup is the upstream protection. We run the opt-outs continuously. Pair it with whatever dispatch flag your department can implement and whatever federal-charges effort your local US Attorney can support.