While playing through some games of Apex Legends, ImperialHal received a visit from police, which momentarily paused his stream.
Unfortunately, there are still streamers getting swatted, which is when someone calls the police and says there is a hostage situation or other threat at the streamer’s house, with the intention of having police or even a full SWAT team show up at the streamer’s house in the middle of their steam. ImperialHal remained casual about the ordeal, probably because it wasn’t the first time it had happened to him.
The police came in the middle of a ranked game which Hal was playing with his TSM teammate Evan Verhulst and former TSM competitive member Mac “Albralelie” Beckwith. Verhulst’s stream shows Hal abruptly stop playing the game, which neither of his teammates seem to notice at first. Verhulst checked on ImperialHal before turning around and rejoining the fight. Although ImperialHal’s friends were unaware of what was happening, the chat informed everyone that Hal had been swatted.
Meanwhile, viewers could hear loud knocks on Hal’s door on his stream, before policeman leaned into his room and shook him on the shoulder to get his attention. Viewers could even hear one of the police officers say “you got swatted” and informing him that he could get right back to playing the game in a minute before Hal turned his microphone and camera off.
Minutes later, Hal returned to his stream, and told everyone what had happened. According to him, the police know these calls are trolls, and allegedly told Hal he “should do something” about them. As most people know about swatting, there’s very little streamers can do about anonymous phone calls sending police to their house outside of moving addresses.
Hal went on to say that one of the officers responded to the call knew who he was, and probably plays Apex. When one officer asked Hal if he was “a big deal,” the other confirmed that Hal had about 30,000 viewers.
Unfortunately, it’s often difficult to find and punish swatters, even though this has now happened to ImperialHal multiple times. Luckily, he found himself in a situation where the police knew that he wasn’t a danger to anyone, and didn’t escalate the situation past informing him of what had happened. Also luckily for Hal, his teammates are good at the game. Despite losing Hal while he talked to the police, Verhulst and Albralelie still managed to win their ranked game while down a player.
