She Rebuffed Phone Scammer, Then Got 'Swatted'

A phone scammer allegedly took "no" to a brutal new level in Nova Scotia. The CBC reports that realtor Lynn Clark Colpitts received a call from a woman claiming to be from the fraud department of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. When Colpitts declined to download a bogus "CIBC Guard" app or share information with the caller, she said the woman hurled vulgar insults at her. Roughly 20 minutes after the call ended, heavily armed police officers swarmed her home.

Police say they'd received a fake report of a shooting and hostage-taking at her address, a "swatting" call Staff Sgt. Marc Rose describes as apparent retaliation for Colpitts' noncompliance. "The part I don't get is, like, I wasn't rude to the woman on the phone," Colpitts tells the ChronicleHerald. "I was never rude to her." And yet, even as officers cleared her house, the scammer kept calling back with threats. "This is just the start," she reportedly said, gloating about the police response. Colpitts says emails and death threats have followed, and her photo on her agency's website was replaced with an offensive image. No arrests have been made.