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Dorchester Center, MA 02124
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 Jane Easterly, Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Green of Georgia and Republican Senator Rick Scott of Florida. One of the hoax calls, court documents would later say, led to a car accident that resulted in serious injuries.
But this time, the calling voice isn’t Torswatts. Instead, according to US prosecutors, he ran the operation by 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 of Torswats feeding 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 such call, targeting the home of Georgia state senator Jon Albers. He told dispatchers he caught his wife sleeping with another man and, after killing her, held the man hostage. “I will release him for $10,000 in cash,” he added, threatening to detonate pipe bombs and blow up houses if his demands were not met.
Eventually, Phillips called Dennis and told him that the FBI planned to arrest Torswats. And they needed Dennis’s help.
According to the plan, the bureau will ask the teenage suspect’s father 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 angry ex-husband persona and start another telegram conversation with Torswats about swatting his ex-wife. Then he should stall as long as possible to keep Torswatts on his computer, logged into his account — so the police can stop him. Denise, despite being ill with Covid, agrees.
Instead, to his and the FBI’s surprise, Torswats accompanied his father to the police station to retrieve his devices. The police arrested him silently on the spot. As was his nemesis Finally taken into custodyDennis was too ill to celebrate.
Both the FBI and the Justice Department declined WIRED’s requests for comment, including questions about why it took the FBI so many months after learning Torswatts’ name — even after searching his home — to arrest him.
About two years into his investigation, Dennis finally learns the teenager’s name: Alan Fillion. He sees Fillion’s photo for the first time and mentally replaces the image of DeShocker’s face with the actual alleged swatter teenager he used to prey on. Like Dshocker, Filion was big. He had long, brown hair. In the photo, she wore a wide-eyed, innocent expression.
At the time of his arrest, Fillion was 17 years old. When Dennis’ case began, Fillion was just 15 years old.
Filion fits the profile of many online criminals. He, like Dennis, seems to have grown up online, finding community in niche forums rather than in the physical world. His high school years were defined by the isolation of the pandemic lockdown. According to Antelope Valley Community College in Lancaster, Fillion began pursuing a degree in mathematics in the fall of 2022 after graduating high school. But an Antelope Valley professor barely remembers him. A person who knew him said he was quiet and “remarkable”, with few friends.
A man claiming to be a friend of Fillion alleged that he was part of a group aimed at inciting racial violence and that he wanted money “to buy weapons and do a mass shooting.” An anonymous tip, submitted to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center and obtained by Wired, alleged that the man behind the Torswatts account was affiliated with a neo-Nazi sect known as the Order of Nine Angles. The tipster claims he believes Torswatts’ actions are contributing “to the end of the day” by “bleeding the system money and man-hours”.
