The first episode is about the practice of “swatting,” where someone calls in a prank call about holding hostages or something similar, which compels the police department in the town that is called to send a SWAT team to a person’s house. This practice has been a big deal among gamers, who are aggressive with each other online, with the most extreme among them doing things like swatting in order to get back at another gamer. Of course, false alarms like this cost law enforcement agencies thousands of dollars and takes resources away from places where they’re actually needed.Web of Make Believe: Death Lies and the Internet Season 1 Download.
It can also lead to some dire circumstances, as we see in the case of Tyler Barriss, who got in the habit of calling in bomb threats to various schools around the country, then called one into a TV station near his Los Angeles home, just to see live coverage of the threat as the building is evacuated. He was linked to dozens of pranks, which sent him to county jail for over a year. But when he got out, he started taking requests from people who wanted to “swat” other people; in a particular instance, a Call Of Duty user challenged Barriss to “swat” him, and gave him an address in Wichita. It turned out to be his previous address, and WPD SWAT teams ended up shooting an innocent man, Andrew Finch, who died in the raid.
Our Take: Web Of Make Believe is one of those true crime docuseries that asks a lot of its viewers, mainly because a viewer can’t watch the series with a detachment that they might use for a murder or something that they can’t imagine happening to them. But much of what this series examines are online phenomena that could very easily happen to its viewers — maybe it’s happening right now.Web of Make Believe Death Lies and the Internet Season 1 Download.