FBI Warns Coloradans About Increased Doxxing and SWATting

If there’s one thing that Coloradans have been concerned about recently, it’s been an increase in cybercrime.

Get our free mobile app

As a state, we’re one of the most affected in the entire country. 

In fact, we got ranked as the fourth worst state in the country for cyberattacks, with 53,562 being reported between 2018 and 2024.

Within that four year stretch, Coloradans lost a grand total of $508,886,418, which is an absolutely astronomical amount.

People are getting duped in multiple different ways. Whether you’re getting scam emails, text scams, or even scams surrounding fundraising for wildfire victims, Coloradans are impacted by this issue at a higher rate than nearly the rest of the country.

With that being said, cybercrimes don’t just make up scams alone. The FBI has recently warned Coloradans and Americans at large that the issue is much bigger than that.

Doxxing Becoming Prevalent in Colorado

Over the past few years, there’s been a new type of cybercrime that has been sweeping across the internet; doxxing. 

For those who may be unaware, doxxing is the practice of somebody finding personal information about someone online and spreading it to a large audience.

Most of the time, the point is to embarrass the person, but it can have real world consequences as well.

For example, a common form of doxxing is for people to leak someone’s home address online to a public forum, which is extremely dangerous for obvious reasons and has forced people to have to move completely.

UC Berkeley recommends keeping as much personal information offline as possible. This includes removing any address or places of work from your accounts, and not discussing any of that stuff online. 

Also, they recommend keeping your accounts private as another way of avoiding this.

Fortunately, there are some laws in place that are meant to protect you from doxxing in Colorado, specifically to protect child protection workers, code enforcement officers, and health care workers.

SWATting Also is a Major Concern in Colorado

Another terrible online harassment tool that people have been using has been SWATting, which truly is a terrifying experience for those who go through it. 

SWATting is essentially a cruel prank, where a person calls 9-1-1 and reports an innocent person for a heinous crime. It gets its name because in a lot of cases, SWAT teams will arrive on the scene and raid the victims house.

This has been used a lot against online streamers over the past decade or so. This can be used to embarrass or intimidate people, but it has actually directly led to deaths before. 

Fortunately, these situations are figured out rather quickly, but for the victim, it is an absolutely terrifying experience.

Remember, if you fall victim to a cybercrime, you can get in contact with the FBI using the Internet Crime Complaint Center.