A California teenager prosecutors say is responsible for hundreds of swatting attacks around the United States was exposed after law enforcement pieced together a digital trail left on some of the internet's largest platforms, according to court records released this week.
Alan Winston Filion, a 17-year-old from Lancaster, California, faces four felony charges in Florida's Seminole County related to swatting, or fake threats called into the police to provoke a forceful response, according to Florida state prosecutors.
Police arrested Filion on January 18, and he was extradited to Seminole County this week.
Filion's arrest, first reported by WIRED last Friday, marks the culmination of a multi-agency manhunt for the person police claim is responsible for swatting attacks on high schools, historically black colleges and universities, mosques, federal agents, and threats to bomb the Pentagon, members of the United States Senate, and the US Supreme Court.
Ultimately, a YouTube channel, Discord chats, and usernames related to The Lord of the Rings helped lead authorities to Filion's doorstep.
An attorney for Filion was not immediately available to respond to WIRED's request for comment.
More than a year before the swatting attack on the Florida mosque, agents with the US Federal Bureau of Investigation interviewed Filion's father, William, at his home in Lancaster, California, according to court documents made public on Wednesday.
In October 2022, authorities investigating swatting incidents involving calls made to a school in Anacortes, Washington, came across a Telegram user associated with multiple swatting and doxxing channels.
Over the following months, court records say, the FBI monitored channels linked to this user.
One of those, a channel called Torswats, had shared recordings of nearly 20 hoax calls threatening locations around the country, including schools in Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Texas.
In December, Dennis reached out to a user behind Torswats and asked to chat on a peer-to-peer chatting service called Tox under the guise of ordering a swat.
According to records shared with WIRED, not mentioned in the arrest warrant, while interacting on Tox, Dennis used Wireshark to monitor his network traffic.
This Cyber News was published on www.wired.com. Publication date: Thu, 01 Feb 2024 01:43:04 +0000