'A**holes' swat GTA 5 actor's house during Thanksgiving livestream

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And it isn't the first time it's happened.

Michael sunbathing in GTA V
(Image credit: Rockstar Games)

Ned Luke, the voice of Grand Theft Auto V's Michael De Santa, decided to spend some of his Thanksgiving streaming GTA Online for fans. But the event was spoiled when anonymous trolls had Luke's home swatted by the police.

Luke was chatting with fans while idling in a menu in GTA Online, when he received a phone call. After speaking for a few seconds, he hung up, saying. "All right, I gotta go, now these assholes have swatted my house".

Luke was then offline for several hours, presumably dealing with the incident. It's not entirely clear what happened during this period, but it seems the situation was defused without the police actually breaching Luke's home or pointing guns at him. In the meantime, however, some users began pointing fingers toward Rockstar, accusing them of being complicit in Luke's harassment because GTA Online doesn’t hide IP addresses from modders.

When Luke returned, he was quick to correct this line of thinking. "This had nothing to do with Rockstar," he posted on not-Twitter. "These assholes leaked my private info years ago and have been doing this shit since. Anyone's info is available online if you are sick enuff [sic] to really wanna find it." Another user, who delivered pizza near where Luke lived, replied to the thread to confirm that he'd seen "a stupid amount of cop cars and cops" approach Luke's home in a separate incident at an unspecified point in the past.

Swatting is a form of harassment perpetuated by some online trolls, whereby faked emergency calls are used to wrongly (and illegally) direct armed police forces to the victim's house. It remains a problem in the streaming community. The Streamer IShowSpeed was recently swatted twice within a week. It can also have deadly consequences. In 2017, Wichita resident Andrew Finch was shot and killed by police when a victim of an unrelated swatting incident provided a false address to police, directing them to Finch's home.

Rick Lane
Contributor

Rick has been fascinated by PC gaming since he was seven years old, when he used to sneak into his dad's home office for covert sessions of Doom. He grew up on a diet of similarly unsuitable games, with favourites including Quake, Thief, Half-Life and Deus Ex. Between 2013 and 2022, Rick was games editor of Custom PC magazine and associated website bit-tech.net. But he's always kept one foot in freelance games journalism, writing for publications like Edge, Eurogamer, the Guardian and, naturally, PC Gamer. While he'll play anything that can be controlled with a keyboard and mouse, he has a particular passion for first-person shooters and immersive sims.