A Wisconsin man who made a fake emergency call designed to portray the SWAT team’s responses in an elaborate scheme that includes a hacked doorbell camera was sentenced to 44 months in federal prison on Thursday.
Kya Christian Nelson, 23, of Racine, Wisconsin, pleaded guilty in January to counting one conspiracy of unauthorized access to a computer she was protected to retrieve information. The “swatting” incident he organized in 2020 took place in California, Michigan, Montana, Georgia, Virginia, Texas, Illinois, Florida and Alabama.
Nelson has been in federal custody since August 2024 and was previously sentenced to prison in Kentucky.
Nelson and his co-conspirators hacked 12 ringhome security camera accounts and made fake emergency calls to police. They then live streamed the armed responses of executives on social media. They also untook police officers and victims responding via ring devices during several incidents, officials said in a news release Thursday.
The victim was a stranger to Nelson and his conspirators, officials confirmed Thursday.
Nelson and others were able to enter a ring account by illegally obtaining their Yahoo Mail account username and password and identifying individuals who used the same credentials for their RingHome Security System. Two of the victims were in Southern California.
One West Covina home was targeted in November 2020 when Nelson and his co-conspirator called a city police station claiming they were minor children at their home. They told police that the children’s parents were drinking and shooting inside the house, where multiple firearms were found there. Police cleared residents from their homes at muzzle.
Three days later, Oxnard’s home was targeted and Nelson called local police and claimed he was a child again, saying his father had a handgun in the house. Nelson then made a second false appeal to police and reported a hearing where he was fired at the victim’s residence.
When police responded, Nelson used ring cameras to intimidate officers and prosecutors said.
In the memorandum of the verdict, prosecutors explained that Nelson and the people he works with would “terrorize innocent people across the country from behind the keyboard.”
One of Nelson’s indicted co-conspirators, James Thomas Andrew McCarty, 22, of Kaenta, Arizona, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy and was sentenced to seven years in federal prison in June 2024.
In a 2022 Times statement, when Nelson and McCarty were indicted, the ring said that they “take your security very seriously,” and took steps to increase protection, including requiring customers to verify their identity when logging in with the stolen ring password and scanning the web.
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