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 — Despite the natural urge to gravitate toward information that reinforces our own views, most agree that people genuinely want to be well-informed. But in recent years, campaigns by corporations, lobbyists and political operatives sowing division and suspicion have become a common problem.

Soon after the coronavirus pandemic began, small anti-stay-at-home protests erupted in dozens of states around the country.

“When things appear to be spontaneous and exciting, and especially, they're happening all over the country, that tends to gain a lot of media attention,” said Edward Walker, a UCLA sociology professor and author of Grassroots for Hire: Public Affairs Consultants in American Democracy.

But many of these protests that appeared to be generated spontaneously were in fact manufactured by well-funded organizations. The practice is known as “astroturfing.”

“Astroturfing is an effort to mobilize the mass public in a way that distances that mobilization from the person who is sponsoring it or the organization that's sponsoring it,” explained Walker.

While fake grassroots campaigns have been utilized for decades, some experts trace the first documented case of astroturfing on social media to South Korea in 2012.

“A lot of astroturfing campaigns have been all over the Internet,” said JungHwan Yang, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, whose research focuses on data science and political communication. “It's not just on Twitter or Facebook. It's on Wikipedia. It's on a forum and everywhere.”

A study from Princeton University found that “there were at least 53 such influence efforts targeting 24 countries around the world from 2013 to 2018.”

“These campaigns really do try to cover their tracks,” said Walker. “They can often do so very effectively. Even the website domains that they use can be registered privately such that you can't tell who's behind it.”

Multiple cybersecurity firms investigated the “Reopen America” movement, finding that domains were being batch registered within seconds of each other.

They were subsequently traced back to state-based firearms coalitions, and ultimately, to a pro-gun Iowa family.

“Once a couple of accounts become really popular, they can gather thousands of followers, and then, they can use that platform to spread disinformation,” said Yang.

Experts say it’s difficult to identify astroturfing campaigns without deep cyber forensics.

“We're essentially pointing a fire hose of information at people all the time and expecting them to do a lot of heavy lifting and sifting,” said Stephanie Craft, head of the Department of Journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “That seems to be a lot to ask.”

One way to do that, she says, is to watch for messaging that strikes a nerve or sparks an immediate visceral response.

“The fact that you're having that emotional reaction means it's time to stop and think about what that message is trying to do,” said Craft.

Experts say it’s important to vet sources as much as possible. Look at account history, language and messaging. Just because an issue appears to have an organic groundswell of support doesn’t mean the strings aren’t being by pulled by a concealed group.

This week is News Literacy Week, and the E.W. Scripps Company has teamed up with the News Literacy Foundation to help you battle misinformation.