According to federal prosecutors, a California adolescent was sentenced to four years in prison on Tuesday for making hundreds of swatting calls, including to a Seminole County mosque and university.
In November, Alan W. Filion, 18, entered a guilty plea to four counts of making interstate threats to injure the person of another. Swatting is the act of placing a prank call to emergency services in order to have a significant number of armed police officers dispatched to a specific location.
From August 2022 to January 2024, Filion allegedly made over 375 harassing and threat calls, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. According to prosecutors, among those communications were those in which he claimed to have planted bombs in specific locations or threatened to detonate bombs and/or conduct mass shootings at those locations.
According to prosecutors, he directed his attacks toward government officials, religious institutions, secondary schools, colleges and universities, and individuals throughout the United States. Filion, who resides in Lancaster, a city located north of Los Angeles, was 16 years old when he made the majority of the calls.
He admitted to making calls, including one to a public high school in Washington state in October 2022, as part of a plea agreement. In this call, he threatened to commit a mass shooting and claimed to have planted explosives throughout the campus.
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According to investigators, he deceived the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office by fraudulently reporting a mass shooting at the Masjid Al Hayy Mosque in Sanford on May 12, 2023. Approximately 30 law enforcement officers responded; however, they were unable to locate the gunman.
The FBI and the sheriff’s office collaborated to investigate numerous accounts on websites that provided swatting services. Numerous IP addresses associated with these accounts led to Filion’s residence.
Additionally, he entered a plea of guilty to a May 2023 telephone call to a historically black college and university in the Northern District of Florida, during which he asserted that he had planted explosives in the walls and ceilings of the campus housing.
Florida A&M University was the recipient of an explosives threat on May 18, 2023, although the Justice Department did not specify the university.
In July 2023, he made a false identification as a senior federal law enforcement officer, provided the dispatcher with the officer’s residential address, claimed to have killed the federal officer’s mother, and threatened to kill any responding police officers during a call to a local police department dispatch center in Texas.