A few weeks ago, a Connecticut mayor received an email in his inbox from an anonymous address. The email claimed my father was holding my family at gunpoint in our home. The concerned mayor passed the email to our local police, who diligently showed up at our door. A few hours later, the police department returned to our driveway responding to a phone call report that my younger brother had killed his whole family, packed a bag, and was going on the run.
My dad is a kind-faced physics professor at Yale with a funny German accent and a tendency to mispronounce the word mustache. He spent that day lecturing about metal alloys, attending a yoga class, and stuffing our obese chihuahua full of snacks under the table. He did not—and I say this confidently—hold anyone at gunpoint.
Similarly, my little brother had been comfortably settled into his gamer chair at the time of his alleged murder, where he was alternating between half heartedly writing an essay and playing FIFA. In an unfortunate coincidence, my dad had returned from vacation the day before and had left a huge packed bag by the door. But once the police were able to discern that the bag was stuffed with damp wetsuits and not survival tools and weapons, it became clear that my brother was innocent. He, like my father, disappointed the town police when he opened the door knifeless and bloodless, as confused and distressed about the accusation as they were.
The discrepancy between the reports and reality was not accidental but actually can be explained by a method of harassment called swatting. Swatting is a tool that appears most commonly in online gaming feuds and goes something like this: Someone is mad at you. They falsely report to the police that you are dangerous or in a dangerous situation so that the police burst into your house and scare you. By the time the whole miscommunication is sorted out, you’ve gotten so frightened and the police have been so inconvenienced that everyone is miserable. Therefore, it appeared that my family had been swatted. Twice.
Before the whole swatting incident could be explained, our attackers participated in a few other forms of harassment. They posted my parents’ private information—social security, addresses, relatives—onto the internet, texted and called us with confusing and unsettling messages, and diligently continued to send false reports to the cops. With each unenthused police officer knocking on our door to investigate an outlandish crime, the plot thickened.
I left campus to join my distressed family, who were tired, confused, and quite a bit twitchier than normal. No one could make any sense of the affair. But as the investigation began, the town police sat us all down and asked us the question that became central to cracking the case: Who hates you?
So, our search began.
The police department had taken an eventful break from their usual work—a tasteful combination of relocating stranded swans and raccoons from dangerous roads and giving frightening anti-sexting presentations to middle school students—to start the investigation. They immediately suspected my rattled younger brother of online delinquency, which was the most common explanation for swatting.
It took a few days of persuasion and some valuable input from another young gaming neighbor, but we ruled my brother innocent. He promised the police he was not secretly a Twitch streamer, and we eventually learned that he doesn’t play any of the games through which swatting traditionally occurs. He is, in fact, a very civil member of the online community. Our only possible lead was that he had been permitting his animated soccer players on FIFA to perform mocking celebratory dances after their virtual goals, but my brother promised he would never allow such behavior from his players.
Next, the police suspected in-person feuds. One officer intently stared my brother down as he inquired if he had, “any sporting enemies?”
To which my brother responded, “I, uh, played a JV friendly tennis match yesterday? Could it be that?”
It was decidedly not that.
Our next course of action was investigating my dad, whose plethora of brilliant and high-strung Yale science students might have been the culprit. My dad was insistent it wasn’t his students, of whom he spoke very highly. He also assured us that he makes an effort to be deeply kind and amenable to all of them and couldn’t think of any particularly rageful suspects. Still, we diligently piled around his computer to read his teaching reviews in our investigation. Our result was a sizable collection of reviews that said something like, “Professor Schroers is very chill, but sometimes his problem sets are really hard.”
Our inquisitive minds ruled that, despite the injustice of my dad’s problem sets, the responses didn’t quite seem to have the conviction of someone willing to harass my father and his family.
The investigation then migrated to my mother, who proudly declared that she, in fact, did have many enemies. However, most of these enemies were earned from disputes between prickly elderly neighbors and my mom’s liberal approach to off-leash laws with our poorly trained dogs. While we were comfortable declaring their resentment a motive, we weren’t confident these retired rivals had quite the technological equipment for the attack.
My twin brother spends all of his time at the local climbing gym and couldn’t think of any particularly inflammatory climbing moves or jumps that could have angered anyone lately. He was off the hook.
That leaves, of course, me and perhaps the least funny theory of the motive behind the attack: antisemitism. This idea was suggested to my family unrelentingly by law enforcement and friends. The concern was initially raised because of my mother’s employment at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, which appears immediately in a Google search of her name. Her affiliation seemed to make her a clear target. This context was combined with the several articles I have written for The Argus, where I mention or discuss my Jewish identity, proving a likely precedent for the swatting. These concerns were cemented because some of my writing expressed opinions about the Israeli/Hamas war for which I had received sizable negative feedback. After connecting these dots—the Holocaust museum, the articles, the frizzy curls—my mother and I emerged as the most likely root of our attacks. Cyber security and law enforcement agreed: it was probably because of our Judaism.
Accordingly, I was told to avoid Jewish events on campus, not to write for the paper, and to cancel my plan to apply to Jewish program housing. My mom checked with other museum employees. We did what we could to keep a low profile and live with the sour taste of antisemitism in our mouths.
Even in this discomfort, there was a comical sort of absurdity. As we debriefed this theory, I couldn’t help but think back to 2000 years of antisemitic persecution and violence, with organized pillaging, murder, and terror. With that in mind, I looked at the sloppily manufactured email our attacker had sent to the mayor. It didn’t feel in keeping with the usual enthusiasm of antisemites to use Twitch stream tactics as warfare: I was unimpressed.
The attacks continued for a few more days without resolution. To make matters even more Kafkaesque, law enforcement was as idiotic and ineffective as ever. The town police were growing weary of pulling into our driveway in the middle of the night after more alleged heinous crimes. They had no theories or plan of action and were content to return to their swan-saving. The Yale police blamed Wesleyan suspects, and Wesleyan authorities blamed Yale students—a ping pong of Connecticut prestige that felt a little detached from the mission at hand. Eventually, my sharp Jewish mother took matters into her own hands and heroically hired a cyber security group ominously named “BlackCloak” that cracked the case: our data had been stolen in a data leak and sold (at a humblingly low price) to an online organized crime group in Romania. They used harassment as an eventual shakedown technique to get money. The attacks were a formulaic criminal extortion method: when they were done with us, they’d start on someone else.
The ending of this story is quite anticlimactic. We had our answer, which wasn’t personal or targeted. The attacks lessened over time. We tightened our digital security diligently. We changed our passwords. We got over our fears and went back to living.
But the experience taught me a lot about my family. I learned what games my little brother plays and how important digital sportsmanship is to him. I learned that my father is an earnestly kind professor who never doubted his students’ innocence. I learned that my dog doesn’t do well confronting law enforcement—she apparently hid behind my brother’s leg while the police interviewed everyone, presumably shaken with guilt about her murder of a friend’s chicken a few months ago.
More than that, though, I had the opportunity to think about something we don’t often take the time to reflect on: who hates me? What do my family and I do every day that creates enemies in our community? And how do we respond when anger begins to hurt?
When my mom was told that the attacks presumably came from her work with the Holocaust Museum, she angrily stood up and announced to the house that she “wanted to do even more digital project management for the museum now!”
My dad returned to his classroom with the same dedicated kindness to each student in the room.
I, who had been avoiding any publication for fear of provoking our attackers, decided to tell the story with the very writing I was told induced the attacks.
It is a weird thing to be under attack when you don’t feel particularly important or powerful. In the end, our attack was not personal, targeted, or relevant to any of our proposed theories. But for the week of investigating and theorizing that my family did, we considered every choice we made to anger someone, every part of our identity the world might hate, and every enemy we engaged with. This resulted in fear and a lot of reflection on our everyday choices and acts of provocation. For a week, as we scrutinized every possible enemy we’d ever made, we were reminded that we exist in a world of publicity, anger, and exposure. So the question becomes, if you’re under attack because of who you are, or what you do, or how you walk your dogs, is it worth it? If it puts your family at risk, are the things you stand for worth it?
I’ve peeled through each of my articles considering this question. When your words have consequences—scary, confusing, real consequences—you think about each sentence and argument intently. You are accountable to yourself in a way you don’t usually consider. This reality consumed our house. My mom has thought about her work at the museum, and my dad has thought about his classroom. My brothers thought about their climbing moves and virtual dances. From this reflection, I can say this: we left the experience with fear, lots of new passwords, and a bit less faith in our local law enforcement’s investigative skills. But ultimately, we did not leave with regrets about the way we interact with our community or the possible enemies we’ve made. My mom’s work made the Holocaust Museum’s historical data organized, presented, and public—well worth the possibility of antisemitism. My brother’s online etiquette remained as respectful as the day he downloaded his games—an affirmation of his character we don’t always remember. My articles are works of research, introspection, and argumentation that represent what I care about and what I believe. I love the words I’ve chosen and I am proud to be held accountable for the articles I publish.
The tennis victory, Judaism, dog walking, and article writing are all pieces of who we are. Maybe the Romanian online mob cares about them, maybe they don’t. But I now know, with newfound confidence, that I can take pride in the things I do every day that make people angry.
Julia Schroers is a member of the class of 2027 and can be reached at jschroers@wesleyan.edu.