Coco the dog was barking inside Louise Gray’s house Monday afternoon — and he wouldn’t stop.

He only does that when someone’s in the yard, so the Langley, B.C., homemaker and mother of two went to the door and opened it.

“I went outside, and I had all the guns and the SWAT team pointing at me, telling me to go to the end of the road and to keep my hands up,” she said.

Eighteen police cars had been dispatched to their home.

“I said, ‘I’m a housewife. My kids are inside,’” Gray said. Police denied her request to go get them, trundling her into a police car and saying they would telephone 16-year-old Eric, who was still asleep, and Daniella, 18, who was browsing Facebook. Moments later, the two came out with their hands raised and their pockets turned out.

Less than two hours later, the ordeal — instigated by a hacker thousands of kilometres away — was over. “It was surreal,” says Gray.

The Internet hoax known as “swatting,” where a SWAT team gets a fake 911 call and turns up on the doorstep of an unsuspecting homeowner, has moved north from the United States.

Gray’s family may well be the first victims of this common U.S. prank after a 911 call was routed through the family’s home computer, leading RCMP to believe a man had killed several people at the home, and was holding others hostage.

“It’s really frightening stuff,” OPP Commissioner Chris Lewis told the Toronto Star, adding he has yet to hear about anything similar in Ontario.

“It’s scary with the voice over Internet Protocol stuff ... where you can make a call look like it is coming from somewhere it’s not,” he said.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, swatting refers to falsely reporting an emergency to a police department to cause a Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) response to a specific address.

“If someone is identified we will do everything in our power to put charges forward. Making a false report to police is a serious thing. It did tie up a lot of resources ... that could have been used elsewhere if there was a (real) emergency,” Const. Jillian Roberts of the Langley RCMP told the Star.

Roberts said the call was traced back to a cellphone number in California.

Gray told the Star that a hacker has been harassing her son and the rest of the family for over a year, using Eric’s email account to send viruses and pornography to friends, family and teachers at his school. The hacker even posted Gray’s husband’s name, address and phone number online, making it look as if he is an abortion doctor. He is actually a longshoreman.

The family approached police three times about the hacker, but nothing was resolved. “The police basically said, ‘Don’t go on the computer.’ I said, well that’s not very realistic. Everything is done on there, the kid’s homework is done on there,” Gray said.

After police realized that Monday’s hostage threat was a hoax, Gray asked them to come in and take all the computers, hoping the incident would put an end to the hacker’s tyranny. Gray says she’s frustrated, but glad the police are finally taking the problem seriously.

Chester Wisniewski, senior security adviser with the IT security company Sophos, said this 911 hoax exploits a security shortcoming with voice-over-Internet (VoIP) phone services that let people mask their true location.

Wisniewski said since VoIP services rely on street addresses provided by customers, someone can sign up for a service using the address of a victim they want to target with their hoax.

“Originally you couldn’t use 911 services with a VoIP phone, but then the government (both in Canada and the United States) forced the Internet phone companies to have people register an address,” he told the Star.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation says a 19-year-old Washington state man was charged last year after pretending to be calling from the home of a married California couple, saying the husband had just shot and killed someone.

“A local SWAT team arrived on the scene, and the husband, who had been asleep in his home with his wife and two young children, heard something and went outside to investigate after first stopping in the kitchen to pick up a knife. What he found was a group of SWAT assault rifles aimed directly at him. Fortunately, the situation didn’t escalate, and no one was injured,” the FBI states.

It appears no one is immune to swatting.

The home of Parry Aftab, a well-known Internet safety expert and lawyer, was swarmed Monday by New Jersey police and SWAT team members responding to a fake hostage report from an unknown male caller, CBS reported.

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The caller told police he was armed and had two hostages at Aftab’s home in Wyckoff, a suburb just west of New York City. After three hours police eventually fired tear gas, but only found her cat inside.

Gray knows how easily her ordeal could have turned deadly. “I was really nervous because they were all standing with guns aimed at me,” she said.

“I thought, I hope nobody slips.”

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