Then, between Christmas Eve and New Year, there was a series of new exchanges. They attacked nearly a hundred politicians and law enforcement officials in a brazen coordinated campaign: US Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Jen Easterly, Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Republican senator Rick Scott of Florida. One of the hoax calls, court documents later state, caused a car accident that resulted in serious injuries.
But this time, it wasn't Torswats who called. Instead, according to US prosecutors, he orchestrated the operation, providing the names, addresses and phone numbers of the targets to a 21-year-old man and a 26-year-old man from Serbia and Romania. plans with the lines Torswats offers them.
It's a familiar scenario. “I shot my wife in the head with my AR-15,” a man who identified himself as “James” said in one such call, aimed at the home of Georgia senator John Albers. He told dispatchers that he caught his wife sleeping with another man and that after killing her, he took that man hostage. “I will release him for $10,000 cash,” he added, threatening to detonate pipe bombs and blow up the house if his demands were not met.
Finally, Phillips called Dennis and told him that the FBI planned to arrest Torswats. And they need Dennis' help.
According to the plan, the Department will ask the teenage suspect's father to go to the local police station to retrieve the computers they have seized. While the father was there, Phillips explained, Dennis should adopt his miserable ex-husband persona and start another Telegram conversation with Torswats about beating his ex-wife. He should then delay as long as possible to keep Torswats at his computer, logged into his account—so the police can rush in and arrest him. Dennis, despite being sick with Covid, agreed.
Instead, to his and the FBI's surprise, Torswats went with his father to the police station to pick up his equipment. The police quietly arrested him on the spot. As his enemy is was finally caughtDennis was too sick to celebrate.
The FBI and the Department of Justice both declined WIRED's requests for comment, which included questions about why it took the FBI months after learning Torswats' name — and even after searching his home — to arrest him. keep him.
Nearly two years into the investigation, Dennis finally learned the teenager's name: Alan Filion. He sees pictures of Filion for the first time and replaces the image of Dshocker's face with that of the supposedly truly powerful teenager he is hunting. Like Dshocker, Filion is huge. He has long, loose brown hair. In the photo, he has an innocent look on his face, his eyes wide open.
At the time of his arrest, Filion was only 17 years old. When Dennis's case began, Filion was 15 years old.
Filion fits the profile of many online criminals. He, like Dennis, seems to have grown up online, finding community in niche forums rather than the real world. His high school years were defined by the isolation of pandemic lockdowns. According to Lancaster's Antelope Valley Community College, Filion began studying mathematics in the fall of 2022 after graduating from high school early. But an Antelope Valley professor is unlikely to remember him. One person who knew him said he was quiet and “unforgettable” with few friends.
A person claiming to be a friend of Filion accused him of being part of a group aimed at inciting racial violence and that he sought money to “buy weapons and carry out a mass shooting.” An anonymous tip, submitted to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center and obtained by WIRED, alleges that the individual behind the Torswats account is affiliated with a neo-Nazi cult known as the Order of Nine Angles . The tipster stated that he believes Torswats' actions are contributing to the “doomsday” by “bleeding the system's finances and man-hours.”