Swatting

Everything else on this site is written about something aimed at you. This is not. It is a false report of an ongoing serious crime, made to law enforcement in order to bring an armed response to an address. ^[1]

Notice where you are in that. You are the subject of the report and you are not in the conversation it happens in — it is made to somebody else, about you, and the first you know of it is what arrives at your door. That single fact is why almost none of the advice elsewhere on this site transfers.

Why the advice on the rest of this site does not apply

Everything else here assumes the harm needs your attention to work — that a provocation is aimed at you, and that what you do with it changes what happens next. That assumption is what makes "don't feed the trolls" coherent advice in its proper place.

None of it holds here. Declining to reply, muting, blocking, locking your account or going quiet all operate on a channel this does not travel through. The advice people offer most readily — "just ignore it", "log off for a while", "delete your account" — is not merely useless in this case; the last of those destroys the record you may need.

This page does not tell you how to behave while it is happening. There is no source we could cite for that, what officers do varies between forces and between countries, and nobody reads a website in the middle of it. Saying nothing is more honest than improvising advice that could get someone hurt.

If it has already happened

Get the reference number. Whoever attended will have logged the incident, and that number is what connects this to anything that comes afterwards. Write down the date and time, which force attended, and who was in the building.

It is not over when the vehicles leave. The part that lasts is not the hour itself: it is sleeping afterwards, the neighbours, the landlord, the expectation that it can happen again. That is a reasonable thing to need help with, and it does not require anyone to have been injured.

The people you live with were part of this. Whoever shares your address was also on the receiving end of it, and if there are children in the building they were too. Where you rent, or share a building, the landlord or building manager is likely to hear a version of events from somebody else first.

Keep the record somewhere other than your own memory. Keeping the reference number and capturing what led up to it is the same discipline the rest of this site asks for, and it matters more here, because the incident and the online activity around it will sit in two different places.

If someone has said they will do it

A threat is not a prediction you have to evaluate. It is a thing that has already happened, it has a timestamp, and it is what you work with.

Capture it before it moves. Screenshot the message and the account, and copy the link to the item itself — what to capture and why. Posts get deleted and reposted; the account name changes; the record is what survives.

Tell the people at your address today. Not because anything is certain, but because the alternative is that they find out at the door.

A platform can act on the account and the post. It has no part at all in what happens at your home, and the two need to be handled separately rather than one instead of the other.

Telling someone before anything happens

No source quoted on this page tells you to do this. It is our reasoning, set out plainly so you can disagree with it.

If you have been threatened, contacting your own local force in advance — not as an emergency, but to say that a false report may be made about your address — puts a dated account of your situation somewhere other than your own memory, before the night it might matter. That is the whole of what it does. It cannot stop a call being made, and no page can tell you what any particular force will do with what you tell it.

UK guidance is clear about which number to use: call 999 if you or someone else is in immediate danger, and local police otherwise. ^[2] For other countries, the emergency and non-emergency numbers are listed by country.

For some people, contacting police is not a neutral act, for reasons that are entirely real. If that is you, a support service can be the first call instead — several of them are independent of any force and help whether or not you ever report anything to anyone.

If you moderate a space where this comes up

Do not repeat it. Quoting an address to condemn it publishes the address again. Preserve it privately, then remove it.

Preserve before you remove. Removal is right. A deletion with no capture leaves the person it names with nothing to show anybody.

Tell the person it names. They are better placed than you to judge what it means, and they cannot act on something they do not know about.

Do not try to identify the account holder yourself, and do not send anyone to the address to check. Both make you a second problem alongside the first.

What tends to appear first, in a space you moderate, is a request for a named person's home address inside an already-hostile thread, or a suggestion — usually framed as a joke — that somebody ought to send officers to their house. Neither is a joke once it has been said in front of an audience that includes somebody willing to act on it.

Reporting

In England and Wales the offence of wasting police time covers knowingly making a false report that tends to show a crime has been committed, or to give rise to apprehension for the safety of persons or property. ^[3] What that gives you is language: what happened to you has a name in the system you are talking to, and it is not "someone being a nuisance online".

Laws differ substantially between countries, and nothing here is legal advice. What matters in practice is what your own local force and the platform will act on, which is a question only they can answer.

Support services by country lists organisations who can help, including several that are independent of any force.