Photo: Lionel Bonaventure (Getty Images)A troll conspiracy to capture a generic Twitter handle has resulted in death, Nashville ABC affiliate WKRN has reported. According to the station, an underage extortionist going after the “@Tennessee” Twitter account placed a false 9-11 report (“swatting”) of a shooting at the home of 60-year-old handle owner Mark Herring. When confronted by a police force shouting to put his hands down, Herring suffered a heart attack and died.Herring’s family members told the station that, leading up to the tragedy on April 27th, 2020, pizza deliveries for Herring mysteriously arrived at their homes—a common troll to make the recipient pay for pizza they hadn’t ordered. On the morning of his death, they later learned, Herring had received a call demanding that he sell his handle and refused.In May 2020, a federal grand jury charged Tennessee resident Shane Sonderman, a minor at the time of Herring’s death, with a litany of threats and coordinated harassment campaigns against Herring and five other people over valuable handles. The maximum for all charges are fines of up to $1 million and 35 years in prison.According to the brief summary in the indictment, Sonderman and co-conspirators set out to loot “simple,…
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Teens' Scheme to Takeover Twitter Handles Ends With Tragic Death in Swatting Incident
