Five Campuses Hit by Hoax Calls in a Week: What Does It All Mean?

In the span of just a week, five universities across the country were thrown into chaos by nearly identical hoaxes: reports of active shooters that turned out to be false. The University of Arkansas, the University of South Carolina, Iowa State University, Villanova, and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga all went into lockdowns or evacuations after emergency calls claimed there were gunmen in libraries, dorms, or lecture halls. Police swept buildings, students barricaded themselves in classrooms, and social media swirled with rumors, only for authorities to later confirm there was no threat.

Officials are calling these swatting incidents, a term for making false emergency reports to provoke a heavy police response. On the surface, that seems to be what’s happening here. The similarities are too obvious to ignore: multiple calls made within minutes, background noise to simulate gunfire, and targets that are symbolic campus buildings. What makes this different from the usual ‘prank’ swatting call is the sheer scale. When five schools are hit in less than a week, it’s not just a nuisance; it’s a campaign.

I’ll admit these stories fill me with a sense of dread. The rational explanation is that this is either some idiotic 4chan stunt or the result of one hoax inspiring a wave of copycats. We’ve seen that before. In the past, these kinds of crimes tended to stay confined to one community. A rash of fake bomb threats at local schools, for example, might sweep through a single city or county. But with the internet, these things no longer stay local. One bad idea can ripple outward overnight, turning into a national, or even global, phenomenon.

The darker possibility is harder to push aside. What if this is more than just trolling? I can’t help but wonder if these hoax calls are being used as a kind of test run. If someone wanted to carry out an actual attack on a university campus, what better way to study police response than by watching them scramble to repeated false alarms? How quickly do they arrive? Which buildings get locked down? How long before classes resume?

That may sound paranoid, and maybe it is. But given the long history of school shootings in this country, it doesn’t feel like an entirely unreasonable fear. This is one time I truly hope it’s ‘just’ internet trolls behind the calls. Because while the hoaxes themselves are disruptive and dangerous in their own right, students have already been injured in evacuations, and every false report wastes police resources. There’s another risk too. In a tense situation like this, innocent civilians could be mistakenly injured or even killed by police who believe they are responding to a live shooter. The line between a false alarm and a tragedy can be frighteningly thin.

For now, campuses and law enforcement have no choice but to treat every one of these calls as real. Students shelter, officers sweep, and classes are canceled. It’s the only safe response, but it also gives the hoaxers exactly what they want: fear, chaos, and disruption. Whether this is the work of trolls, copycats, or something more deliberate, the fact remains that universities across the country are under siege, even if the bullets aren’t real. Not yet, anyway.

(Sources)

UPDATE 8/26/2025: West Virginia University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have now been added to the growing list of schools targeted by hoax active shooter threats. These are the only additional cases that have been publicly identified so far.

In an update to the update, the Central Georgia Technical College was also targeted.