Young Fortnite Pro Swatted Live On Stream During Tournament

Professional Fortnite player and streamer Cody 'Clix' Conrad was swatted in his home this weekend during a live broadcast while playing in a Fortnite Championship Series game. He's 14 years old.

Clix was forced to abandon the stream and announce to viewers that he would have to leave the match as he realised that the police had been called to his home. "Police are here," he said. "Yo, I just got swatted...one second, I gotta go."

Swatting, if you're unaware, is a cruel and incredibly stupid hoax that in which someone calls up the police and reports a false crime to the address of a chosen victim, with the supposedly hilarious end result being that the victim has armed officers storm into their house.

Besides being an obvious waste of police time, there are also so many other ways in which swatting can (and has) gone terribly wrong. In December 2017, for example, one such prank ended in the tragic death of an innocent father of two, as police stormed the house of Andrew Finch following a prank and a bet involving three gamers that Finch was entirely unaware of and unconnected to.

The gamer who made the call - Tyler R. Barriss - was sentenced to 20 years back in March for his involvement with the incident, as well as his previous history in hoax calls to law enforcement.

More recently, Casey Viner (the one who initially dared Barriss to make the call) was sentenced to 15 months, and an additional two years in which he's barred from gaming or any gaming-related activities.

Despite the severity of the sentencing and actual loss of life in the case of Barriss and Viner, it seems that there are still idiots out there who believe swatting is any way a good idea or appropriate thing to do to another human being.

Fortunately, Dexerto reports that in the case of Clix, nobody was harmed, and since he had already been eliminated from the game he was forced to abandon, his sudden departure didn't hurt the team and they were able to win the match in question.

Clix later took to Twitter to rightly blast swatting as "disgusting" and question the point of it. If a 14-year-old kid gets this, there's really no excuse for anyone else. If you think swatting is funny, maybe go and have a word with yourself. And by have a word with yourself, I mean punch yourself in the face.

Topics: epic games, Fortnite