Teen Behind Hundreds of Swatting Attacks Pleads Guilty to Federal Charges

In perhaps the largest swatting case to ever be prosecuted, an 18-year-old from Lancaster, California, has pleaded guilty to federal charges stemming from a nationwide spree of hundreds of shooting and bomb threat hoaxes that sent police scrambling to high schools, courthouses, and the homes of law enforcement officials and prominent politicians.

Alan Winston Filion now faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison for each of four counts of making interstate threats to injure the person of another, according to the United States Department of Justice.

Early this year, Filion was arrested and extradited to Seminole County, Florida. At the time, state prosecutors charged Filion with four state-level felony counts stemming from a single incident in which, prosecutors allege, Filion told a Sanford Police Department dispatcher that he was armed with pipe bombs and an AR-15 rifle and was walking into Masjid Al Hayy Mosque to kill everyone he saw.

Filion, whom authorities believe operated online as “Torswats,” has been in jail without a trial for nearly a year. He entered a plea of not guilty to the state charges.

The federal charges announced on Wednesday, along with interviews from people connected to the investigation—and Filion himself—allege his swatting activities reached far beyond Florida’s borders.

Between approximately August 2022 to January 2024 Filion made more than 375 swatting calls, according to the plea agreement. These included incidents where he claimed to have planted bombs or threatened to conduct mass shootings at targeted locations that included religious institutions, high schools, and historically black colleges and universities.

“This prosecution and today’s guilty plea reaffirm the Justice Department’s commitment to using all tools to hold accountable every individual who endangers our communities through swatting and hoax threats,” deputy attorney general Lisa Monaco said in a statement. “For well over a year, Alan Filion targeted religious institutions, schools, government officials, and other innocent victims with hundreds of false threats of imminent mass shootings, bombings, and other violent crimes. He caused profound fear and chaos and will now face the consequences of his actions.”

According to court records, Filion was also part of a high-profile international swatting group that targeted several prominent figures between December 2023 and January 2024. Among the victims were US Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency director Jen Easterly, Republican US representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, and Republican senator Rick Scott of Florida. Investigators say they linked the scheme to roughly 100 calls, one of which targeted an unnamed former president of the United States.

In August, the Department of Justice charged two European men, Tomasz Szabo and Nemanja Radovanovic, in connection with the widespread swatting operation, which led to at least one car accident with injuries. During interviews with the US Secret Service in January and February, both men admitted their roles in the scheme. Radovanovic, however, claimed that he was directed by a third party who provided detailed scripts and selected the targets.

According to the plea agreement, Filion admitted to orchestrating the operation, supplying the names, addresses, and phone numbers of many of the targeted individuals.

“I shot my wife in the head with my AR-15,” a man identifying himself as “James” said in one such call. He told dispatchers in Georgia that he caught his wife sleeping with another man and, after killing her, had taken the man hostage. “I’ll release him for $10,000 in cash,” he added, threatening to detonate pipe bombs and blow up the house if his demands weren’t met. This call targeted the home of Georgia state senator John Albers.

The case against Filion, first reported by WIRED, was built on a trail of digital evidence left across platforms like Telegram, YouTube, and Discord, and pieced together by Brad “Cafrozed” Dennis, a private investigator. Dennis had been hired by two high-profile Twitch stars, both victims of Torswats’ calls, to find the person responsible.

For months, Dennis had posed online as a vengeful ex-husband looking to troll and harass his former wife. He used this persona to infiltrate private Discord servers and Telegram groups where Torswats and affiliates hung out. These were chats dedicated to extortion plots and racist memes; channels filled with child sexual abuse material, self-harm, and animal abuse—some of the worst content he’d ever seen, Dennis told WIRED.

On New Year’s Eve 2022, Dennis sent Torswats a private message on Telegram: “You wanna make some real cash? Add me on Tox,” he wrote, referring to the peer-to-peer messaging service, under the pretense of arranging a swatting.

Using network monitoring tools, Dennis then captured the IP address linked to the Torswats account and uncovered a new username: “Paimon Arnum.” In January 2023, Dennis handed this critical piece of evidence, along with other usernames and active Discord servers he had tracked over several months, over to the FBI.

According to emails reviewed by WIRED, that information was central to how the FBI broke the case and was the basis of subpoenas sent to Discord and Google in April of 2023 seeking information on accounts Dennis had identified. By early May, the FBI had successfully pinpointed Torswats’ identity and location.

That month, Torswats privately took responsibility for swatting incidents in Telegram chats reviewed by WIRED. These incidents affected up to 25 schools in Washington state, impacting approximately 18,116 students and costing taxpayers an estimated $271,173 in lost instructional time, according to Don Beeler, CEO of TDR Technology Solutions, a company specializing in school surveillance and threat analysis.

Additionally, 911 audio and other police records obtained by WIRED corroborate that the same individual made the calls for more than a dozen of these swatting incidents. In some instances, the caller told dispatchers he had been commanded by Satan to kill students. In others, he said he had been mistreated because he was gay. In others, he seemed to have become bored enough with the game that he didn’t bother to make up a reason.

On July 12, the Torswats handle announced a new swatting operation dubbed the “Grand Offensive,” targeting a dozen senators. Three days later, the FBI raided Filion’s home and seized his electronic devices.

But the raid didn’t stop the swatting.

On November 6, 2023, someone using the Torswats handle took responsibility for a bomb threat aimed at North Beach High School in Ocean Shores, Washington, through a Telegram message. According to police reports and call records obtained by WIRED, the caller impersonated a drug dealer who wanted to report his client to the police because he had said he had placed pipe bombs around the school and was planning a mass shooting. That same month, a person going by Torswats also admitted to swatting an investigator and cybercrime expert named Keven Hendricks in private Telegram communications.

Both threats could be attributed to the same individual, according to a law enforcement official who reviewed the recordings for WIRED but requested anonymity because they were unauthorized to speak to the press.

Details about Filion’s life outside his online activities remain sparse. Enrollment records from Lancaster’s Antelope Valley Community College show that Filion began pursuing a degree in mathematics in the fall of 2022. A former classmate, who requested anonymity due to fears of retaliation, described Filion as quiet and “forgettable.”

“He didn’t appear to have many friends,” they said.

In January 2024, an individual affiliated with the Torswats Telegram account and claiming to be a friend of Filion suggested that he was part of a group aiming to incite racial violence and that he sought money to “buy weapons and commit a mass shooting.” The allegation aligns with a written tip, placed to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center in April 2023 and obtained by WIRED, alleging that the person behind the Torswats account was involved in a neo-Nazi cult known as the Order of Nine Angles.

“He believes he is doing his part to bring about the end of days by ‘bleeding the finances and man hours of the system,’” the tipster wrote.

Filion’s family could not be immediately reached for comment. A sentencing date for the teenager has not yet been set.

Updated at 10:45 am EST, November, 2024: Added additional details about Filion’s involvement in swatting attacks against prominent US government officials and others.