Then, between Christmas Eve and New Year's, came a new deluge of swattings. They hit nearly 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 say, caused a car accident that resulted in serious injuries.
But this time, the voice in the calls was not Torswats. Instead, according to US prosecutors, he orchestrated the operation, providing the targets' names, addresses and phone numbers to a 21-year-old and a 26-year-old from Serbia and Romania who allegedly organized and swatting was performed. scheme with Torswats lines fed to them.
It's a familiar script. “I shot my wife in the head with my AR-15,” said a man who identified himself as “James” in one such call, targeting the home of Georgia state senator John Albers. He told dispatchers that he caught his wife sleeping with another man and, after killing him, took the man hostage. “I'll get him out for $10,000 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 plans to arrest 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 should use his already aggrieved ex-wife and start another Telegram conversation with Torswats about beating his ex-wife. Then he must stop as long as possible to keep Torswats on his computer, logged into his accounts—so the police can come in and arrest him. Dennis, even though he was sick with Covid, agreed.
Instead, to his and the FBI's surprise, Torswats accompanied his father to the police station to retrieve his devices. The police quietly arrested him on the spot. Like his opponent finally imprisonedDennis was too sick to celebrate.
Both the FBI and the Justice Department declined WIRED's request for comment, which included questions about why it took the FBI so many months after learning Torswats' name—even after his home was searched—to arrest him.
Nearly two years into his investigation, Dennis finally learns 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 actual alleged teenage swatter he was hunting. Like Dshocker, Filion is big. He has long and lank brown hair. In the photos, she wears a wide-eyed and innocent expression.
At the time of his arrest, Filion was 17 years old. When Dennis' case began, Filion was only 15 years old.
Filion fits the profile of many online offenders. He, like Dennis, seems to have grown up online, seeking community in niche forums rather 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 began working on a math degree in the fall of 2022 after graduating high school early. But one Antelope Valley professor barely remembers him. One person who knew him said he was quiet and “forgetful,” with few friends.
A person who claimed to be a friend of Filion said he was part of a group aimed at inciting 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, revealed that the individual behind the Torswats account was involved with a neo-Nazi cult known as the Order of Nine Angles. The tipster said he believes Torswats' actions are contributing to the “end of days” by “bleeding the system financially and man-time.”
