A Wisconsin man has been sentenced to 44 months in federal prison for his role in a series of "swatting" attacks leveraging hacked Ring doorbell cameras to provoke and live-stream armed police responses, according to the KTLA. Kya Christian Nelson, a 23-year-old from Racine, Wisconsin, carried out the cyberattacks during one week in November 2020, affecting households across the country, including those in West Covina and Oxnard, California.
In a statement obtained by the Department of Justice, Nelson and his co-conspirators gained access to victims' doorbell cameras through compromised Yahoo email accounts and then used the same login credentials to hack into the associated Ring accounts. Posing as various distressed individuals, they placed hoax calls to the local police, which led to the dispatch of armed officers to the unsuspecting victims' homes.
During one of these incidents, Nelson and an associate made a bogus report claiming that a violent altercation involving firearms was occurring within a home. The West Covina Police Department responded to the hoax by removing the homeowners at gunpoint, while Nelson taunted officers through the hacked Ring camera. A similar scenario played out in Oxnard, where another false report led to a police raid on an innocent family's residence. According to KTLA, "during that police operation, Nelson used the camera to taunt and threaten responding officers."
"[Nelson] and his co-conspirators went on a digital crime spree, terrorizing innocent people around the country from behind their keyboards," prosecutors argued, the Department of Justice reported. James Thomas Andrew McCarty, 22, of Kayenta, Arizona, one of Nelson's co-conspirators, was sentenced last year to seven years in prison after pleading guilty to similar charges and admitting to another swatting incident in Florida.
Nelson, who has been in federal custody since August 2024 and was already serving a sentence in Kentucky for an unrelated crime, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy and two counts of unauthorized access to a protected computer to obtain information in January. The investigation led by the FBI revealed the extent of the crime spree and the distress inflicted upon civilians and law enforcement alike.
