With guns drawn, police raid home of trans Twitch streamer Clara 'Keffals' Sorrenti in latest swatting debacle

pcgamer.com:

On August 5, streamer and activist Clara «Keffals» Sorrenti awoke with a gun in her face. Her home was being raided by police in response to a threatening email that she didn't send. Someone had swatted her.

The attack is connected to a sustained harassment campaign against the streamer, which last month saw anti-trans trolls abuse Twitch's reporting system to get her suspended from the platform for 28 days(opens in new tab).

The London police (in the Canadian province of Ontario) told Sorrenti that an email had been received by all of the city's councillors at 6 am that day. In it, a person claiming to be Sorrenti, who is a trans woman, announced that she had obtained a gun, killed her mother, and planned to go to City Hall and «shoot every cisgender person» in sight. Although Sorrenti doesn't know who impersonated her in the hoax email, she tells PC Gamer that she believes the information used in the swatting «came from the same community» that had been abusing Twitch's reporting system.

Sorrenti's family had previously contacted the London Police Service about being put on a «no-swatting» list, but were treated like they were «wearing tinfoil hats,» she says. Despite that attempt to warn the authorities about the possibility of a swatting attempt, the email was taken seriously and police arrived at her home fully armed, with a warrant to search for firearms, phones, and computers.

Although police found her mother unharmed and no firearms in the house, Sorrenti says they seized phones and computers belonging to both her and her partner. The confiscations left them both «functionally unemployed,» she says, and necessitated spending «thousands of dollars» replacing the electronics, which are still held by the police.

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