School – MMO Fallout

Sky News reports this week that hundreds of UK schools had to evacuate in response to 24,000 emails sent out carrying fake bomb threats, due to an apparent feud between Minecraft communities. As reported by Alexander Martin, Sky News was able to get in touch with one of the perpetrators who had deliberately falsified the emails so that they would appear to be from another community, VeltPvP, to schools demanding ransom payments of thousands of dollars with the threat that a bomb would be detonated inside the school if the ransom wasn’t paid. The intent, according to the participant, was to get the VeltPvP domain shut down.

We have had a number of calls this morning about a bomb hoax at many of our region’s schools. All of the schools have been spoken to and there is not believed to be any viable threats #ProudToProtect pic.twitter.com/iGafyMfAvx

— Northumbria Police (@northumbriapol) March 19, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Another of the alleged perpetrators attempted to justify the bomb threats as a response to allegations that VeltPvP had been attacking other servers and when asked if he felt remorse, another responded “I’m not going to lose sleep over it.”

We have nothing to do with the bomb threats that were sent out to the 400+ UK schools.

We’ve been being harassed by a group of cyber criminals that are trying to harass us in anyway possible.

We’re extremely sorry for anyone who had to deal with this, but just know it’s fake.

— VeltPvP (@VeltPvP) March 19, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

(Source: PCGamer via Sky News)

Am I the only one who has noticed that stupid people have a habit of doing stupid things? Case in point? Back in 2007, teenagers on Long Island started a fad of running into fences to knock them over. Every once in a while you hear on the news that someone called a bomb threat to a school or business as a joke. Stupid? Yes. Dangerous? Maybe. Liable to ruin your future? Absolutely.

Earlier this year, a gamer in RuneScape learned just that lesson when police showed up at his house to arrest him over a threat made in-game. In addition to multiple anti-Semitic comments, Thomas Frongillo reportedly also said “I’m shooting up my school tomorrow.” Frongillo was arrested and charged with threatening to commit a crime and threatening a bombing or hijacking. He contested that it was just a harmless jest.

The moral of the story is nothing. The people who need to be told that saying “I’m going to shoot up my school” is a stupid idea aren’t going to pay attention anyway.