California teen Alan Filion sentenced to 4 years for making swatting calls
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In May 2023, Alan Filion called a historically black college and university in North Florida, in which he claimed to have placed bombs in the walls and ceilings.

FLORIDA, USA — A California teen who pleaded guilty in November to making swatting calls in several states, including Florida, was sentenced to four years in prison on Tuesday, a court document states.

Alan Filion, 18, of Lancaster, Calif., has been adjudicated guilty on four counts of interstate transmission of threats to injure people, the document shows; he entered a plea of guilty to four incidents of making swatting calls: on Oct. 10, 2022, May 12, 2023, May 18, 2023, and July 10, 2023. The document also shows that he will be placed in a prison in California.

Swatting is the act of making a prank call to emergency services in an attempt to bring upon a SWAT team response to a particular address. It has become especially popular in recent years as people and groups often target celebrities and politicians.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Filion made more than 375 swatting and threat calls from August 2022 to January 2024. In some of the calls, he claimed to have planted bombs in targeted locations or threatened to detonate bombs and/or conduct mass shootings at those locations, prosecutors said. Filion was 16 years old at the time he placed majority of the calls.

The document indicates that Filion went by many different pseudonyms, which include: “Nazgul Swattings,” “Torswats V3,” “Third Reich of Kiwiswats,” “The Table Swats,” “Angmar,” and “Torswats.”

In October 2022, Filion called a high school in Washington, in which he threatened to commit a mass shooting and claimed to have planted bombs throughout the school. In one of the incidents in May 2023, the teen carried out a similar tactic; this time, he placed a call to a historically black college and university (HBCU) in North Florida, in which he claimed to have placed bombs in the walls and ceilings of campus housing that would detonate in about an hour.

And in the July 2023 incident, Filion called a police department in the U.S. Attorney Office’s Western District of Texas, in which he falsely identified himself as a senior federal law enforcement officer, provided the officer’s home address to the dispatcher, claimed to have killed the officer’s mother, and threatened to kill any responding police officers.

Upon release from prison, Filion will be put on supervised release for three years, according to the document. Conditions of his supervised release include participating in a mental health program and prohibited from incurring new credit charges, the document states.

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