Kya Christian Nelson, Swatting, California 2020

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Kya Christian Nelson, Swatting, California 2020

A Wisconsin man was sentenced to 44 months in federal prison for taking part in a one-week nationwide ‘swatting’ spree that targeted innocent residents in California and other states.

Kya Christian Nelson, 23, of Racine, Wisconsin, was sentenced by United States District Judge John A. Kronstadt. Nelson pleaded guilty on January 23 to one count of conspiracy and two counts of unauthorized access to a protected computer to obtain information. He has been in federal custody since August 2024 and previously was serving a prison sentence in Kentucky after being convicted in state court there in an unrelated case.

From November 7, 2020, to November 13, 2020, Nelson and co-conspirators gained access to home security door cameras sold by Ring LLC, a Santa Monica-based home security technology company. Nelson acquired without authorization the username and password information for Yahoo! email accounts belonging to victims throughout the United States.

The conspirators then determined whether the owner of each compromised Yahoo! account also had a Ring account using the same email address and password that could control associated internet-connected Ring doorbell camera devices. Using that information, they identified and gathered additional information about their victims.

Then, the conspirators placed false emergency reports or telephone calls to local law enforcement in the areas where the victims lived. These reports or calls were intended to elicit an emergency police response to the victim’s residence. The conspirators then accessed without authorization the victims’ Ring devices and transmitted the audio and video from those devices on social media during the police response. They also taunted responding police officers and victims through the Ring devices during several of the incidents.

In one incident, Nelson and a co-conspirator accessed without authorization Yahoo! and Ring accounts belonging to a victim in West Covina. A hoax telephone call was placed to the West Covina Police Department purporting to originate from the victim’s residence and posing as a minor child reporting her parents drinking and shooting guns inside the residence.

Prosecutors argued in a sentencing memorandum that Nelson and his co-conspirators ‘went on a digital crime spree, terrorizing innocent people around the country from behind their keyboards.’ Nelson’s sentence was handed down on an unspecified date.