MISSION, Kansas: In recent weeks, roughly 50 college campuses across the United States have been rattled by waves of hoax calls reporting armed attackers, bomb threats, and other violence, triggering lockdowns, evacuations, and widespread fear.

The calls, now known as "swatting," underscore the difficulty schools and law enforcement face in distinguishing genuine danger from elaborate pranks—while still needing to act decisively to prevent mass casualties.

On several campuses, students spent tense hours barricaded in classrooms and crouched under desks, only to discover later the threats had been fabricated. On September 11, a cluster of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) canceled classes or went into lockdown after receiving alarming calls. The threats came at a particularly raw moment: campuses nationwide were already on edge following the fatal shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk at a Utah college earlier this month.

The FBI has opened an investigation, but no arrests have yet been made.

The surge in swatting comes against the backdrop of frequent mass shootings, including one at a suburban Denver high school this week and another at a Minneapolis church two weeks earlier that left two children dead and more than 20 injured. Against such a grim backdrop, officials say every threat has to be treated as real. "We have so many mass shootings in this country and so many young people die," said Wendy Via, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. "You can't just blow it off because there have been a bunch of hoaxes."

The practice has its roots in fake bomb threats and online gaming disputes, but has since metastasized into something darker. Swatting groups now operate in loosely organized online communities, where participants swap tactics on avoiding detection and sometimes livestream their calls for entertainment. The FBI confirmed that swatting cases have increased sharply since it created a dedicated tracking center in 2023, with thousands of incidents reported.

One group, calling itself Purgatory and linked to the broader network "The Com," has been tied to recent waves of threats, according to reports from watchdog nonprofits that monitor online extremism. Recordings captured by these organizations reveal callers laughing, belching, and even rapping while staging their elaborate fabrications.

A recent swatting attempt at Kansas State University illustrated how trained dispatchers can sometimes spot a fake. The caller rang a non-emergency line rather than 911, a red flag since real emergencies are automatically routed to local centers. The suspect also misnamed the school as "Kansas City State University" and claimed to see a gunman in the library while playing gunshot sounds that seemed lifted from a television show. The dispatcher pressed the caller with skeptical questions, noting inconsistencies, yet officers were still dispatched out of caution.

Experts warn that such hoaxes not only drain police resources but also risk desensitizing campuses, where lockdown drills and active shooter alerts have become routine. "I hope we're not desensitized enough to this that we don't take alerts seriously anymore," said Miceala Morano, a 21-year-old journalism student at the University of Arkansas who sheltered during a recent scare.

For now, students, faculty, and law enforcement remain stuck in the uneasy middle ground: forced to respond to threats that may be jokes, but in a country with mass shootings nearly every week, can never be dismissed.