UFC bantamweight champion Sean O’Malley became a victim of the infamous ‘Swatting’ hoax this past weekend when a SWAT team showed up at his home and detained him at gunpoint while he was live-streaming on Twitch.
O’Malley regularly streams himself gaming on the Twitch platform, making him a prime target for ‘swatting’, a notorious prank in recent years which sees someone phone the police and accuse a streamer of a crime they didn’t commit that leads to a SWAT team being called out to their location while they are still live on camera.
“About an hour and a half in [to the stream] I saw a f**king cop fly down my road,” O’Malley said on his YouTube channel. “I feel like instantly I kind of knew because I’ve heard about like the big, big streamers getting swatted. People find out where they’re at and called the cops and say something happened that obviously didn’t happen and they’re f**king getting swatted.
“I peak out my head out the window to see the cops. Maybe it’s something else. But then they’re on the intercom and I see a bunch of cops and they’re like, ‘walk out with your hands up.’ So I f**king walk out, hands up. I was like, I’m just going listen. I could get shot. You know what I mean? Like, sh*t. I was like, okay, if I just listen to them I’ll be alright, but you never know. Someone sneezes and pulls the trigger. I’ve got f**king shotguns pointed at me, ARs from like four different cops pointed at me.”
It turns out a caller had told police that O’Malley had murdered his parents at his home, which explains why he suddenly had a whole squad of armed police pointing guns at his head in the middle of an otherwise peaceful Saturday afternoon.
“They said I killed my parents, or something like that. They thought there was an active shooter inside,” O’Malley said. “Someone called the cops and told them there was an active shooter inside and two dead people in the house.”
“I wish we could find that little weasel that called. They can’t find him. They don’t have an address. It was crazy.”
There have been several incidents where ‘swatting’ hoaxes like this have gone badly wrong, including a 2017 case in which an innocent 27-year-old man was shot and killed by police at his front door, leading to the person who made the call being sentenced to 20 years in prison.
