By Erin Alberty, The Salt Lake Tribune
A prankster in California used a falsely-registered cell phone to flood Salt Lake City police dispatch with hundreds of calls in a single day last week, police officials said.

Between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. Nov. 2, dispatchers received 617 calls from the number, said dispatch supervisor Pam Peay.

The caller never spoke but wasted hours of phone time for dispatchers, who do not hang up until the caller hangs up, Peay said.

“Toward the end, it was every 30 seconds,” she said.

Fortunately, the calls occupied just one dispatcher at a time and did not leave any legitimate callers on hold, Peay said.

“Swatting” — prank-calling 9-1-1 — is usually accomplished in one of two ways. Disconnected cell phones are required by federal law to be equipped for 911 calls, leaving the number unlinked to any person, Peay said. That gives the caller a degree of anonymity.

Pranksters also use voice over internet protocol, which enables a user to register a number to a fake name at a fake address.

Last Tuesday’s calls were traced to a router in California, but they were made on a number that was apparently registered to a fake identity at a Salt Lake City address, Peay said.

It is not the department’s first case of swatting — so dubbed for the typical prank objective to mobilize a SWAT team to a fabricated incident.

In summer of 2009, a Salt Lake City schoolgirl made thousands of 9-1-1 calls over three or four months, taunting dispatchers and claiming she would never be caught, Peay recalled. An officer traced the disconnected number to a cell tower in the girl’s neighborhood and interviewed residents with children until the caller was found.

“Her parents had no idea,” Peay said. “They just thought she was playing with a phone that didn’t work.

“The public education is not there,” Peay said. “Parents need to know that these phones do that.”

Posted with permission from the Salt Lake Tribune.