Then, between Christmas Eve and New Year’s, came a new deluge of swattings. They hit close to a hundred politicians and law enforcement officials in a brazen, coordinated campaign: US Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency director 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 state, caused a car accident that resulted in serious injuries.
But this time, the voice on the calls wasn’t 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 organized and carried out the swatting scheme with lines Torswats fed to them.
It was a familiar script. “I shot my wife in the head with my AR-15,” a man identifying himself as “James” said in one such call, targeting the home of Georgia state senator John Albers. He told dispatchers that he had 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.
Finally, Phillips called Dennis and told him that the FBI had a plan to arrest Torswats. And they needed Dennis’ help.
According to the plan, the bureau would ask its teen suspect’s father to come in to a local police station to retrieve the computers they’d seized. While the father was there, Phillips explained, Dennis should use his old aggrieved ex-husband persona and start another Telegram conversation with Torswats about swatting his ex-wife. Then he should stall for as long as possible to keep Torswats at his computer, logged in to his accounts—so police could burst in and arrest him. Dennis, despite being sick with Covid, agreed.
Instead, to his and the FBI’s surprise, Torswats accompanied his father to the police station to pick up his devices. The cops quietly arrested him on the spot. As his nemesis was finally taken into custody, Dennis was too ill to celebrate.
The FBI and Justice Department both declined WIRED’s request for comment, which included questions about why the FBI had taken so many months after learning Torswats’ name—even after searching his house—to arrest him.
Nearly two years into his investigation, Dennis finally learned the teen’s name: Alan Filion. He saw photos of Filion for the first time and mentally replaced the image of Dshocker’s face with that of the actual alleged swatter teen he’d been hunting. Like Dshocker, Filion was big. He had long, lank brown hair. In photos, he wore a wide-eyed, innocent expression.
At the time of his arrest, Filion was 17 years old. When Dennis’ case had begun, Filion had been only 15.
Filion fits the profile of plenty of online delinquents. He, like Dennis, appeared to have grown up online, finding community in niche forums more than the physical world. His high school years were defined by the isolation of pandemic lockdowns. According to Lancaster’s Antelope Valley community college, Filion started pursuing a degree in mathematics in the fall of 2022 after graduating from high school early. But a professor at Antelope Valley could hardly remember him at all. One person who knew him says he was quiet and “forgettable,” with few friends.
A person claiming to be Filion’s friend alleges he was part of a group aiming to incite racial violence and that he sought money to “buy weapons and commit a mass shooting.” An anonymous tip, submitted to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center and obtained by WIRED, alleged that the individual behind the Torswats account was involved in a neo-Nazi cult known as the Order of Nine Angles. The tipster claimed he believed Torswats’ actions were contributing to the “end of days” by “bleeding the finances and man-hours of the system.”
