Two males broke right into a dozen Ring house safety digital camera accounts around the U.S., positioned bogus emergency calls to police, then livestreamed officials’ armed responses on social media, government stated Monday.

Kya C. Nelson, 21, of Racine, Wis., and James McCarty, 20, of Charlotte, N.C., have been indicted Friday by way of a federal grand jury in Los Angeles for the “swatting” incidents in California, Michigan, Montana, Georgia, Virginia, Texas, Illinois, Florida and Alabama.

The 2 illicitly bought usernames and passwords for Yahoo e mail accounts, then used the ones credentials to achieve get right of entry to to the Ring accounts of people that used the similar usernames and passwords for the web-linked doorbell digital camera gadget, prosecutors stated.

After taking regulate of the Ring gadget at a house in North Port, Fla., McCarty referred to as native police and claimed he had killed his spouse, rigged the house with explosives and was once conserving a hostage, consistent with the indictment.

In some other case, Nelson or a co-conspirator posed as a kid in a decision to Oxnard, Calif., police, reporting that the daddy was once wielding a handgun and that photographs have been fired, the indictment charged. When police arrived, consistent with court docket paperwork, Nelson used the Ring audio gadget “to verbally taunt” the officials.

Nelson, who additionally is going by way of the title “ChumLul,” was once just lately jailed in Kentucky for an unrelated case involving bomb threats, and McCarty was once in federal custody in Arizona in a separate case involving bomb threats and cyberstalking, consistent with Ciaran McEvoy, a spokesman for the U.S. lawyer’s place of business in Los Angeles.

In a remark, Ring stated it takes “the protection of our shoppers extraordinarily severely” and has taken steps to fortify protections, together with requiring shoppers to make sure their identification when logging in and scanning the cyber web for stolen Ring passwords.