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Then, between Christmas Eve and New Year’s, came a new flood of swattings. They hit nearly a hundred politicians and law enforcement officials in a reckless, coordinated campaign: US Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Jen Easterly, Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, and Republican senator Rick Scott of Florida. One of the hoax calls, court documents would later say, caused a car accident that resulted in serious injuries.
But this time, the voice of the calls is not Torswats. Instead, according to US prosecutors, he orchestrated the operation, providing the names, addresses, and phone numbers of the targets to a 21-year-old and a 26-year-old from Serbia and Romania who allegedly organizes and conducts swatting. plot with lines Torswats fed to them.
It’s a familiar script. “I shot my wife in the head with my AR-15,” a man who identified himself as “James” said in one such call, pointing to the home of Georgia state senator John Albers. . He told dispatchers that he caught his wife sleeping with another man and, after killing her, took the man hostage. “I will release him for $10,000 in cash,” he added, threatening to detonate pipe bombs and blow up the house if his demands were not met.
Finally, Phillips called Dennis and told him that the FBI had a plan to arrest the Torswats. And they need Dennis’ help.
According to the plan, the bureau will ask the teenage suspect’s father to go to a local police station to retrieve the computers they seized. While the father was there, Phillips explained, Dennis had to use his old man who was aggrieved by the ex-husband and start a Telegram conversation with Torswats about breaking up with his ex-wife. Then he had to stop as much as possible to put Torswats on his computer, logged into his accounts—so the police could sneak in and arrest him. Dennis, despite being sick with Covid, agreed.
However, to his and the FBI’s surprise, Torswats accompanied his father to the police station to retrieve his devices. He was quietly arrested by the police immediately. As his enemy was finally taken into custodyDennis was too sick to celebrate.
The FBI and Justice Department both declined WIRED’s request for comment, which included questions about why it took the FBI so many months after learning Torswats’ name—even after searching his home—to arrest him. he.
Nearly two years into his investigation, Dennis finally learned the teenager’s name: Alan Filion. He saw Filion’s photos for the first time and mentally replaced the image of Dshocker’s face with the real alleged teenage swatter he was looking for. Like Dshocker, Filion is huge. He has long, greenish brown hair. In the photos, she wears a wide-eyed, innocent expression.
At the time of his arrest, Filion was 17 years old. When Dennis’ case started, Filion was only 15 years old.
Filion fits the profile of many online offenders. He, like Dennis, appears to have grown up online, finding community in niche forums more than in the physical world. His high school years were defined by the isolation of pandemic lockdowns. According to Antelope Valley Community College in Lancaster, Filion began pursuing a math degree in the fall of 2022 after graduating high school early. But a professor in Antelope Valley barely remembers him. A person who knew him said he was quiet and “forgotten,” with few friends.
A person who claimed to be a friend of Filion alleged that he was part of a group that sought to incite racial violence and that he was looking for money to “buy weapons and do mass shootings.” An anonymous tip, submitted to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center and obtained by WIRED, says the individual behind the Torswats account is linked to a neo-Nazi cult known as the Order of Nine Angles. The tipster admitted that he believed Torswats’ actions contributed to the “end of days” by “bleeding money and human time into the system.”
