What would you do if, during the middle of a game of Call of Duty: Black Ops you found yourself in the middle of a real-life police presence outside your house?
Not many people can legitimately answer that question, but a teenager in Lewisville, Texas can. He was playing Black Ops with his friends, something he does on a regular basis, and nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
Then, as he said in his words during a CBS interview, “Some dude just popped out of nowhere, and basically said he’s going to hack me, he’s going to get my information, call the SWAT team over to my front yard.”
The random message didn’t even cause the teen gamer the least bit of concern. That is, until there was an entire SWAT team, bullhorn and all, right outside his home.
The entire family, shaken and terrified, went outside to figure out what was going on. In the pool of confusion, it was discovered that someone used a telephone relay service to send a message to police, pretending to be from someone inside the teen’s house.
In the message he said someone had been shot and there continued to be gunfire. After the family proved to police there was in fact no real danger, they went back inside unharmed.
Now, the search is on for the gamer that sent the cryptic message during his Call of Duty battle, and to figure out where the phony police call came from.
It was not disclosed whether or not the teenager might have made his home address available for anyone to see, a scenario that has led to many contentious situations throughout the country, from bogus Craigslist ads leading people to someone else’s house, to burglaries from cyber stalkers who can tell when someone’s away on vacation.
The moral of the story? Don’t make your address public, not in this day and age.
