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Then, between Christmas Eve and New Year, came a new deluge of breakouts. They hit close to a hundred politicians and law enforcement officials in a brazen and coordinated campaign: the secretary of Homeland Security of the United States Alejandro Mayorkas, the director of the Agency for Cyber Security and Infrastructure Jen Easterly, Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, and Republican Senator Rick Scott of Florida. One of the hoax calls, court documents later state, caused a car accident that resulted in serious injuries.
But this time, the voice on the calls was 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 organized and carried out the attachment. scheme with Torswats lines fed to them.
It was a familiar script. “I shot my wife in the head with my AR-15,” a man who identified himself as “James” said in one of those calls, made to 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 will release them 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 Torswats. And they needed Dennis’s help.
According to the plan, the agency asked the father of their teenage suspect to come to a local police station to retrieve the computers they seized. While the father was there, Phillips explained, Dennis should use his old aggrieved ex-husband persona and start another Telegram conversation with Torswats to beat up his ex-wife. So he had to stall for as long as possible to keep Torswats at his computer, logged into his accounts, so the police could bust in and arrest him. Dennis, despite being ill 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 officers quietly arrested him on the spot. As his nemesis was finally taken into custodyDennis was too sick to celebrate.
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 searching his home — to arrest him.
Almost 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 that of the current alleged teenage swatter he had chased. Like Dshocker, Filion was great. She had long, sleek brown hair. In the pictures, she wore an innocent, wide-eyed 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 criminals. He, like Dennis, seemed 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 the pandemic blocks. According to Lancaster’s Antelope Valley Community College, Filion began pursuing a degree in mathematics in the fall of 2022 after graduating early from high school. But an Antelope Valley teacher couldn’t remember him. A person who knew him said he was quiet and “forgetful”, with few friends.
A person claiming to be Filion’s friend says he was part of a group that aimed to incite racial violence and 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, claimed that the individual behind the Torswats account was involved in a neo-Nazi cult known as the Order of Nine Angles. The whistleblower said he believed Torswats’ actions would contribute to the “end of days” by “bleeding the system’s finances and man hours.”
