DENVER — Oftentimes, hoax perpetrators are seeking attention and reaction from the community, and we don’t want to help them in that pursuit. We also don’t want to encourage copycat hoaxes.

However, as at least 14 Colorado schools received “swatting” calls Wednesday, specialists point to a growing trend we believe you should be aware of.

Swatting is the act of calling first responders with a fake emergency to coax them into sending a significant police presence to a specific address

Ken Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services, says he’s been tracking a “spate of school swatting threats that has gone on for months” across the United States. He says many previous mass swatting events have been traced to actors from foreign countries.

“Swatting threats typically cross multiple school districts, multiple communities, oftentimes multiple states and originate internationally,” Trump said. “They create anxiety, fear, uncertainty about school safety, drain local first responders from other needs out in the broader community, and can extend over a period of time while the investigation goes on — oftentimes for weeks or sometimes months.”

While it is, at this point, unclear if the multiple threats to Colorado schools were coordinated, Trump says these bad actors often have the specific goal of creating chaos, confusion and fear.

“These threats typically turn out to be unfounded, not credible, but every threat needs to be treated seriously [and] investigated thoroughly,” Trump said. “There’s not only a massive drain of law enforcement resources, but also swatting fatigue and fatigue by school districts: the risk of school communities not taking threats seriously, becoming complacent, and not treating each one seriously when there could be one possible threat that turns out to be credible.”

Sergeant Ryan Scheevel with the Boulder Police Department says he was impressed by the response of students and staff at Boulder High School Wednesday morning. The entire school’s lockdown procedure made law enforcement’s job of evacuating and sweeping the school for the potential threat much easier.

“It was very obvious that they had trained for that,” Scheevel said. “I would implore all schools, employers, anything like that to have a plan in place.”

Scheevel was just a couple hours into his shift Wednesday morning when he heard a weapons tone over his radio, and dispatchers relaying reports of a possible active shooter at Boulder High School. He and his fellow officers quickly realized the threat was likely a hoax, both through conversations with school administrators and messages from dispatch of other fake threats being called in across the state. Still, they had to push forward, per protocol, to ensure it was, in fact, a false alarm.

“We went and had them go into lockdown, and then started going [on] a systematic search of the school, hoping that we weren’t going to find anything, but planning that if we [did] find something — whether it’s a suspect or a victim or somebody’s injured — that we have the resources and a plan in place to deal with that,” Scheevel said.

Even after the all-clear, Scheevel and his fellow officers had to rely on their training and support from one another to process the other great cost of swatting threats: the emotional drain it puts on our law enforcement, teachers, and students.

“Two of my kids are school age, so anytime we get a call at a school, it definitely heightens your sense of what’s going on there,” he said. “When you’ve removed yourself from you that situation, you really think about like, 'That could have been my kids in there.’”

This article was written by Rob Harris for Scripps News Denver.

As of Thursday, April 30, more than 1 million people around the world have won their fight against the new coronavirus.

According to the latest data from

Johns Hopkins University's

Coronavirus Resource Center, over 1,006,000 people have recovered from COVID-19, the illness caused by the virus.

The data shows that most of the recoveries were in Germany followed by Spain and China, where the outbreak began.

In the United States, there have been just under 125,000 recoveries. The U.S. has reported the most positive cases worldwide, at more than a million.

At least 230,800 people have died from COVID-19 across the world as of Thursday, according to Johns Hopkins. More than 61,000 of those deaths were in the U.S.

This story was originally published by staff at WTXL.

CHICAGO — While public health officials continue to wrestle with a global pandemic, crooks have been using the crisis as an opportunity to make a profit. Vendors are peddling fake vaccine cards on the dark web and consumers are ordering purported therapeutic drugs from dubious international sources.

Tens of millions of packages come through nine international mailing facilities around the United States annually. It’s a 24-hour operation.

Each year, Customs and Border Protection officers inspect and screen tens of million parcels to ensure they comply with state and federal law.

And since the beginning of the pandemic, they’ve been busy.

“We were seizing unapproved medications coming from China that were manufactured in clandestine labs,” said Christopher Macko, a supervisory officer with U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

He says his officers have been intercepting everything from fake PPE and COVID-19 testing kits to drugs and phony vaccine cards.

“We were seeing hundreds and thousands of packages coming from unknown lands, basically to the consumer, in the United States,” he said.

Between January of last year and the end of July this year, the agency seized nearly 40 million counterfeit face masks, 187,000 FDA-prohibited COVID-19 test kits, and approximately 40,000 tablets of unapproved chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine.

“This is an open market, an unregulated market, also an illegal market,” said Ryan Linder, an emerging threats expert with Check Point Research.

They’ve been monitoring activity associated with pandemic-related fraud, cyber threats, and illegal commerce—some of it on the dark web.

“We must increase vaccination among the unvaccinated with new vaccination requirements,” said President Biden on Sept. 9.

Linder says the day after President Biden announced an emergency vaccine mandate for American workers, online activity spiked.

“The cost of these of these illegal cards on these platforms doubled overnight,” said Linder. “But more disturbingly, the number of sellers increased by about ten times.”

Earlier this month, Customs and Border Patrol seized two consignments destined for Texas that contained counterfeit vaccination cards from China. They also found shipments from China and Mexico headed to Atlanta, St. Louis and Minnesota that contained the controversial drugs ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.

Linder warns that purchasing these kinds of items not only poses a risk to public health but to your personal information.

“You have no idea where that personal information ends up, so you may get a fake vaccine card. Your data might be sold on the dark web at great profit to these bad actors,” he said.

As the public remains sharply divided over vaccine mandates and controversial therapeutics, Linder says as long as people are willing to buy, the illegal imports won’t disappear.

“They want to have what they want to enjoy their lives and make money and earn a living, but they don't want a vaccine,” he said. “That population, I think, will be fixed for a very long time and therefore there will be a demand that's increasing with each one of these mandates.”

The simple warning to contraband shoppers he says is buyer beware.

As COVID-19 misinformation continues to spread, experts say many people who are sharing it don’t realize the harm they could be doing to others.

It’s not always easy to differentiate between what’s true and what’s not, especially on social media.

It’s exactly what Sally Baalbaki-Yassine teaches her students: to pause before believing everything you see online, because there are algorithms in place specifically directing that information at you.

“My biggest thing is teaching them to always be skeptical of what they see on social media. You just can’t trust everything. To be able to go past this overconfidence bias that we all have," Baalbaki-Yassine said. “We’ve given them permission to do that, right? Where we have agreed to all of these things that we don’t necessarily read that say they can track everything we do on the social media platform and they are using algorithms from like Siri, for example, listening to what we say.”

Unlike disinformation, misinformation isn’t intended to mislead others, but it still can.

“So, if you’re already getting controversial information on other forms, that’s an easy way for a social media platform to be like, 'OK, this person is already absorbing this kind of information, let's give them more of this information,'" Baalbaki-Yassine said.

Anything that you see on social media has been purposely generated to get in front of your eyes.

“What you’re researching, even on Facebook, and who you’re following on Facebook will affect what kind of information you see in your news feed and then if you like certain things that your friends put on Facebook, then you’ll start getting that kind of information to show up as well," Baalbaki-Yassine said.

Experts say when you’re hungry for certainty and clarity, you can become more vulnerable to misinformation.

Jennifer Reich is a professor of sociology and explains it’s only natural for humans to want to feel the information they are getting is a guaranteed safety net. But that’s not the case with science, because there are always new discoveries.

“It’s important noting that when people lack official information that’s clear and trustworthy, they go to informal information. And it’s not exceptional. Most of us listen to our friends, our family, people we think reflect our values and lifestyle, the people we trust," Reich said. “And so that level of uncertainty that surrounds us feels scary and it feels like it’s not trustworthy, and the challenge is that just because we don’t know everything, it doesn’t mean we don’t know anything. You know, science is constantly refining and learning and we’ve seen this with vaccines in the past.”

Researchers with the World Health Organization say there were at least 800 global deaths due to misinformation related to COVID-19 within the first three months of 2020.

“So, there’s a constant process of learning and refining, but living through that process can be really anxiety-provoking and those are the opportunities where official information can feel uncertain and people look for other kinds of information," Reich said. “One of the traits with misinformation is it’s often stated with great certainty and that’s kind of a flag when there is no room to say from what we know now, as we’re learning, right? The kind of things we would expect a scientific process to unfold.”

Reich says that’s why so much misinformation has come out surrounding COVID-19 and the vaccine. As things are discovered, original information can be changed and more people become skeptical.

“And it’s not that it’s all true or untrue, but often it’s competing information. So, there might be something that was shown to be true, and then it’s evolved in a way that doesn’t work scientifically and we’ve learned new things, but that becomes hard to challenge, hard to kill in a lot of ways and it’s still shared," Reich said.

Baalbaki-Yassine and Reich say self-educating is one of the best favors you can do for yourself, but sharing, on the other hand, has larger implications than you may realize.

“So, educating them and helping them understand, giving them digital literacy of it’s not the end all be all, and you should be always skeptical, do your research and don’t share it," Baalbaki-Yassine said.

Three Vermont troopers have resigned following allegations they may have violated federal law by creating fraudulent COVID-19 vaccination cards.

In a news release Tuesday, Vermont State Police confirmed the resignations and announced that the Federal Bureau of Investigations has launched a criminal probe into the alleged crimes. The investigation was first reported by journalists with VTDigger.

"If these allegations are proven true, it is reprehensible that state troopers would manipulate vaccination cards in the midst of a pandemic," Col. Matthew Birmingham said in a written statement.

Former troopers Shawn Sommers and Raymond Witkowski submitted their resignations on Aug. 10, according to the agency. That came one day after another trooper notified supervisors within state police about their alleged actions.

A third trooper, David Pfindel, resigned Sept. 3 following an additional investigation by the Department of Public Safety.

The release from state police notes that the alleged creation of fake vaccine cards was "immediately" reported to supervisors and, soon after, federal authorities. Public Safety Commissioner Michael Schirling noted Tuesday the agency does "not believe there is anything more state police could have done to prevent this from occurring."

An investigation through FBI offices and the U.S. Attorney's Office in Burlington will continue. State police said they were unable to release the information prior to Tuesday as a result of the ongoing federal probe.

"The accusations in this case involve an extraordinary level of misconduct — a criminal violation of the law — and I could not be more upset and disappointed," Birmingham said.

Birmingham described himself as being "embarrassed" by the situation, adding it would likely result in a damaged public image for state police.

Sommers and Witkowski both joined the state police in the summer of 2016.

Pfindel joined the state police in 2014.

This is a developing report. Please refresh this page for updates.

CINCINNATI —

A local professor who studies misinformation about vaccines on social media is adding new insights into the concerns by President Biden that the myths are “costing lives.”

“There are groups of individuals that are doing the work to try to create misinformation, propaganda for various reasons, even monetary reasons,” said Northern Kentucky University's Dr. Traian Marius Truta.

Truta is a professor of computer science, and since 2018, has studied vaccine misinformation spread by social media. Truta said determining exactly how much of an impact misinformation has is hard to quantify.

“Social media plays a huge role in spreading misinformation however, social media also plays an important role in eliminating misinformation,” Truta said.

One myth that gained traction on social media was that the vaccine had a tracking device, another myth claimed that the vaccine made people magnetic. Truta said the most ridiculous claims are believed by fewer people.

“There are some, but very few. I doubt there are very many that are not taking their vaccine because of those claims,” Truta said.

Social media is only one part of the complex misinformation issue. Even if it is hard to measure, the impact is apparent to many doctors.

“The medical community and the scientific communities are trying to get good scientific information out there but it’s a constant uphill battle when things are coming from all different sources that are untrue,” said TriHealth medical director for infectious diseases Dr. Stephen Blatt.

Overdramatizing actual side effects is another form of misinformation and is sometimes very effective. Blatt said false claims that sound like they could be real are also hard to stop.

“One of the ones that’s come up recently is that the COVID vaccine interferes with fertility in men in women. That’s not true. The vaccines are very safe, even in pregnant women and they don’t cause infertility and that’s important to know,” Blatt said.

President Biden and U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy are calling on social media platforms to do more to reign in misinformation about vaccines.

“We know that health misinformation harms people’s health. It costs them their lives,” Murthy said.