Then, between Christmas Eve and New Year’s, there was a new flood 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 state, led to a car accident that resulted in serious injuries.
But this time, the voice on the calls wasn’t Torswatts. Instead, according to US prosecutors, he orchestrated the operation, providing the names, addresses and phone numbers of targets to a 21-year-old and a 26-year-old from Serbia and Romania who allegedly organized the swatting and Done it. The plan was fed to them along the lines of Torsvats.
It was a familiar script. “I shot my wife in the head with my AR-15,” said a man who identified himself as “James” while aiming at the home of Georgia state senator John Albers. He told dispatchers that he had caught his wife sleeping with another man and had taken the man hostage after killing her. “I will let him go for $10,000 in cash,” he added, threatening to detonate a pipe bomb 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 Torsvats. And they needed Dennis’s help.
According to the plan, the bureau would ask the father of their young suspect to come to a local police station so they could retrieve their confiscated computers. While the father was there, Phillips explained, Dennis should use the persona of his long-suffering ex-husband and start another Telegram conversation with Torsvats about swiping his ex-wife. Then he must wait as long as possible to keep Torsvats on his computer, logging into his accounts – so the police can catch him and arrest him. Dennis, despite being ill with Covid, agreed.
Instead, to his and the FBI’s surprise, Torsvats accompanied his father to the police station to pick up his equipment. The police arrested him on the spot. As was his promise Finally taken into custodyDenise was too ill to celebrate.
Both the FBI and the Justice Department declined Wired’s request for comment, which included questions about why it took so many months for the FBI to arrest Torsvats after learning his name — even after searching his home.
Nearly two years into his investigation, Dennis finally learns the teenager’s name: Alan Fillion. He saw Fillion’s photos for the first time and mentally replaced the image of Dashauker’s face with the image of the actual alleged sweater youth he was hunting. Like Dshocker, Filion was big. He had long, brown hair. In the photos, he wore a wide-eyed, innocent expression.
At the time of his arrest, Fillion was 17 years old. When Dennis’ case began, Fillion was only 15 years old.
Filion fits the profile of many online criminals. He, like Dennis, seems to have grown up online, finding community in specialized forums more than in the physical world. His high school years were defined by the isolation of pandemic lockdowns. According to Antelope Valley Community College in Lancaster, Fillion began pursuing a degree in mathematics in the fall of 2022 after graduating early from high school. But one Antelope Valley professor hardly remembers him. A person who knew him says he was quiet and “forgetful” with few friends.
A man claiming to be a friend of Fillion has alleged that he was part of a group aimed at inciting racial violence and that he demanded money to “buy weapons and carry out 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 Torsvats account was involved in a neo-Nazi cult known as the Order of Nine Angles. . The tipster claimed he believed Torswatts’ actions were contributing to the “end of days” by “bleeding the system’s finances and man-hours.”
