SoCal Teen Who Terrorized Police In Nationwide Swatting Spree Sentenced To Prison: DOJ

LANCASTER, CA — A Southern California teen was sentenced Tuesday to four years in prison in connection with a yearslong, nationwide swatting spree, according to authorities.

Alan W. Filion, 18, of Lancaster, was charged with making interstate threats to injure the person of another after he placed over 375 calls from roughly August 2022 to January 2024 in which he threatened bombs and mass shootings at religious institutions and schools and targeted government officials, authorities said.

During the calls, Filion lied to emergency personnel, using false names and claims that sometimes led police to enter homes with weapons drawn and detain occupants, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Filion, who bragged about convincing police to “drag the victim and their families out of the house,” advertised paid swatting on social media, authorities said.

He was arrested in early 2024 on charges out of Florida related to a May 2023 threat to a religious institution in the state, according to authorities, who said he had claimed to have an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, pipe bombs, and Molotov cocktails and had threatened to “kill everyone.”

Filion pleaded guilty to that threat as well as three others: a call in October 2022 threatening a mass shooting at a high school in Washington, another in May 2023 in which he claimed bombs would detonate at a historically Black college in Florida; and a third in July 2023 in which he told a dispatcher in Texas he was a senior federal law enforcement officer and said the officer had killed his mother and would kill responding police, authorities said.