A man from a quiet south Wales village helped run one of the dark web’s most notorious sites — and triggered a hoax that sent armed police storming onto a packed Cardiff street days before Christmas.
Callum Dare, 26, from Talbot Green, has been jailed after an investigation that drew in the FBI, admitting he encouraged “swatting” attacks across the world from behind his keyboard — egging on others to unleash armed police raids on innocent people’s homes for entertainment.
Swatting is the act of making a false report to the emergency services to trigger an armed response at a victim’s address — a hoax meant to terrify, and often filmed and shared online for kicks.
The term comes from SWAT, the heavily armed special weapons and tactics units used by American police. The “prank” involves fooling those units — or their UK equivalent, armed response officers — into raiding an innocent person’s home, sometimes with fatal results.
Dare was sentenced to two years and three months at Cardiff Crown Court after admitting encouraging and assisting swatting and possessing software used for fraud.
The case was brought by Tarian — the regional organised crime unit that tackles serious and cyber crime across southern Wales — after officers were alerted to an FBI investigation involving Dare in May 2019.
Investigators in the United States had traced a series of swatting incidents to a dark-web platform called Doxbin and a linked chat channel, where users discussed swatting, doxing and other criminal activity.
Doxing is the publishing of someone’s private information — such as their home address — without consent, often to enable harassment or an attack.
Officers identified Dare as an administrator of Doxbin, and said he was an active participant in the associated channel, encouraging and helping others to target people and organisations.
Messages recovered from the channel showed him claiming responsibility for multiple swatting incidents in the United States and Canada, according to the force.
Investigators said he had also produced edited video compilations of emergency responses to swatting attacks, taken from livestreams and other footage, and shared them to encourage others.
The investigation went on to link Dare to a swatting incident far closer to home.
On 17 December 2018, a caller falsely claimed to be armed with nail bombs and holding hostages at the Sandringham Hotel on St Mary Street, Cardiff.
Armed officers were deployed and the street — one of the city’s busiest — was evacuated and closed in the run-up to Christmas, causing widespread disruption.
A forensic examination of Dare’s devices recovered footage, CCTV, audio and news reports about the hoax, which the force said had been edited into a compilation video bearing the Doxbin logo.
Officers also found a compressed file containing malicious code designed to imitate dark-web marketplaces and harvest login details, which could then be used to access cryptocurrency wallets and other accounts.
Rather than stand trial, Dare pleaded guilty on 15 June to encouraging or assisting offences and to possessing an article for use in fraud, contrary to the Serious Crime Act 2007 and the Fraud Act 2006.
A spokesperson for Tarian said the force wanted to send a clear warning about the dangers of the crime.
“The consequences of swatting can be extremely serious,” they said. “False reports place innocent members of the public at risk, cause significant disruption to communities and divert emergency services away from genuine incidents.”
Special Agent in Charge Terence G. Reilly, of the FBI’s Nashville Field Office, said swatting was far from a harmless prank.
“Swatting is not a victimless prank — it is a reckless and dangerous crime that can have deadly consequences,” he said.
Louisa Robertson, a specialist prosecutor for the Crown Prosecution Service in Wales, said Dare had endangered people for his own gratification.
“Callum Dare put people in danger by encouraging the triggering of armed police responses, for his own thrills,” she said.
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