An incident occurred in which a Twitter user who received 'swatting' died due to the robbery of Twitter ID



In April 2020, it was discovered that a man living in Tennessee, USA, was

damaged by swatting, which sent an armed police force to a false report, and immediately died shortly thereafter. In this case, a minor and two former minors who were threatening to give up their Twitter ID to a man were caught.

'Swatting' call leads to death of Tennessee man targeted for his Twitter handle
https://www.wkrn.com/news/swatting-call-leads-to-death-of-tn-man-targeted-for-twitter-handle/

A grandfather died of a heart attack after minors swatted him over his rare Twitter handle | TechSpot
https://www.techspot.com/news/90483-grandfather-died-heart-attack-after-minors-swatted-over.html

Tenn. Man Died After He Was'Swatted' by People Targeting Twitter Handle | PEOPLE.com
https://people.com/crime/tennessee-man-dead-swatted-people-targeting-twitter-handle/

Swatting leads to man's death --YouTube


The victim of this swatting incident was Mark Herring, then 60, a technician living in Bethpage, Tennessee. 'My dad was a very smart person. He was always ahead of the curve, so he seemed to have an account right after Twitter started,' said his daughter, Corinna Fitch.



An avid fan of the University of Tennessee football team, the

Tennessee Volunteers , Herring had a Twitter account called '@Tennessee.'

Mr. Herring, who had a valuable Twitter ID of 'state name without extra alphanumeric characters', seems to have frequently offered to give away the ID, and his family often said 'I'm on Twitter again.' The offer has arrived. '

On April 27, 2020, the relatives of Mr. Herring, who lived scattered around Bethpage, all received an unsolicited pizza delivery by cash on delivery. The deliveryman uniformly said, 'This is an order from Mr. Mark Herring.' As we learned later, this was triggered by the swatting criminal disseminating the personal information of the Herring family to the Internet.

Meanwhile, at that time, local police, who were informed that a man had killed a woman, were rushing to Mr. Herring's home with a gun. The moment the police demanded that Mr. Herring raise his hand, Mr. Herring collapsed in a heart attack and died at the hospital he was transferred to. The relationship between Herring's cause of death and swatting is unclear, but Fitch says, 'I think my dad was deadly scared. That's what caused his heart attack.'



In the case, police arrested two people, Shane Sonderman, who was a minor at the time and lived in Tennessee, and a British boy whose identity was not revealed because he was a minor at the time of writing the article. 'Sonderman is from Tennessee. It's also Sonderman who collected personal information such as the address of our family and published it on Discord, a chat app for gamers.'

According to a document filed in the Western District Court for Tennessee, Sonderman was swatting as many as six victims, including Mr. Herring. However, only Mr. Herring died. As part of the harassment campaign, Sonderman and Sonderman's conspirators called an emergency service or police emergency call number and an emergency was underway at the address of the owner of the social media ID they were aiming for. I insisted that it was. '



Sonderman is in prison at the time of writing and is expected to be sentenced to up to five years in prison and a $ 250,000 fine. On the other hand, the British boy who made a false report is a minor, so his identity will not be disclosed or his identity will not be handed over to the United States. It is not known at the time of writing the article what kind of disposition will be taken for this boy.

Mr. Fitch said, 'It seems that a valuable Twitter ID like my father used can be traded at a high price of about 4,000 dollars (about 440,000 yen), but it is a lot of money compared to life.' did.

In the last tweet of the Twitter account that Mr. Herring used during his lifetime, there were many replies saying 'RIP (sleep peacefully)'.

in Note, Posted by log1l_ks