GTA 5 voice actor Ned Luke – aka Michael de Santa – got swatted for the eighth time over Xmas. I don’t mean that somebody belted him on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper. I mean that somebody put in a hoax call to emergency services in a bid to have armed police sent to his house. The latest incident happened this December while Luke was streaming GTA Online with Rob Wiethoff, the voice of John Marston in Red Dead Redemption and Red Dead Redemption 2. YouTuber IceBladeNinja has the whole clip for you to watch below.

“Swatting” is, obviously, very dangerous in a country like the USA, where there are more guns than humans and the police are especially well-armed. It has gotten a couple of people killed, that I know about.

Thankfully, the cops seem pretty relaxed in the footage, possibly because they’re aware that Luke is a frequent target of such malevolent pranking – indeed, one of them can be heard saying “you’ve been swatted again”. If it were me, I’d be lying on the floor nonetheless with all limbs extended at 45 degree angles, but Luke just gets up with a sigh and says hello to the fuzz, then goes back to playing GTA Online for an hour and a half. I guess it’s just as well he didn’t answer the door in character for Michael.

As reported by Kotaku, Luke says he was repeatedly swatted in late 2023, after his address was leaked online, and that at one point, the police ordered him to step outside his house. He’s also initiated legal proceedings against some of the swatters, with one person due to appear in court for sentencing this month – we’ll keep an eye out for that, I guess. It’s not clear there’s any real motivation for Luke’s repeated swatting, beyond random people being spiteful.

This feels like the kind of morbid present-day cultural phenomena the forthcoming GTA 6 should parody, alongside Boris Bikes and Florida Man, but then again, that would only be encouraging the arseholes.