Stalkers sent the police to his house 47 times because he made a joke on Twitter
For 18 months, a teenager allegedly operated a “swatting” service out of his father’s California home where criminals could call in a hoax bomb threat or mass shooting almost as easily as ordering a burger on UberEats.
Alan Winston Filion, 17, is suspected of targeting hundreds of high schools, mosques, historically black churches, US Senators and even the Supreme Court with swatting attacks that placed thousands of people in the crosshairs of heavily-armed police response teams.
Prosecutors say the 6ft 3in teenager advertised his services under the pseudonym Torswats on the encrypted messaging app Telegram, charging as little as $40 to get someone’s gas shut off, $50 for a “major police response” and $75 for a “bomb threat/mass shooting threat”.
Mr Filion would then post chilling audio of the 911 calls on Telegram as a proof of purchase, according to court documents.
Among the hundreds of “swats” that Torswats allegedly claimed credit for were multiple hoax callouts at the home of Patrick S. Tomlinson, a Milwaukee-based science fiction author who says he has been swatted dozens of times in the past four years as part of a targeted harassment campaign by a group of “sociopathic” stalkers.
“You can’t fathom the amount of clinical obsession that grips these people,” Mr Tomlinson told The Independent this week. “Trying to destroy my world is their full time lives.”
Mr Tomlinson told The Independent he had woken in the middle of the night to find officers banging on his door, been handcuffed, and had guns shoved in his face during the yearslong ordeal. He was once swatted four times in one day.
Mr Filion has not been charged in relation to the swats on Mr Tomlinson’s home, and investigators believe there are at least two individuals behind the Torswats account.
The FBI, Milwaukee Police Department and the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office in Florida where the teenager is facing four felony counts declined to provide further information, beyond an extensive account of Mr Filion’s activities in a probable cause charging document.
After Mr Filion was arrested on 18 January at his home in Lancaster, Los Angeles County, Mr Tomlinson said he and his wife Niki
