A California teenager who pleaded guilty to making hoax shooting and bombing threats to institutions around the country will serve four years in federal prison, a judge ruled Tuesday.
Alan Filion, 18, of California, faced a maximum of five years per charge on four counts of making interstate threats but was ultimately sentenced to 48 months, according to the Justice Department.
Federal authorities accused him of being a “serial swatter.” In 375 calls over two years, Filion targeted religious institutions, high schools, colleges, universities and government officials — including FBI agents and numerous other people.
Swatting is the practice of making fraudulent calls to draw a large public safety response where no emergency exists. The FBI formed a database to track swatting calls to facilitate information-sharing among multiple agencies throughout the United States, NBC News reported in 2023.
Federal prosecutors said Filion was making the fake threats both for recreation and to make money. In online posts in January 2023, he admitted making the calls for about two to three years before he eventually decided to make it a business, officials said.
Most of the calls were made when Filion was 16, prosecutors have said.
Filion wrote in a post on Jan. 20, 2023, that when he swats someone he usually gets "the cops to drag the victim and their families out of the house cuff them and search the house for dead bodies.”
About a year later, Filion was arrested on Florida state charges over a 2023 call in which he claimed to have an illegally modified AR-15, a Glock 17 pistol, pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails. He targeted a mosque in that case, threatening to commit a mass shooting on the premises.
According to court records, while he on the phone with the police, Filion played audio of gunfire in the background, which prompted more than 30 law enforcement officers to respond to the mosque.
Once they were inside, officers realized that there was no gunman and that everyone was safe.
He pleaded guilty in federal court in that incident, the Justice Department said.
Filion also pleaded guilty to three other incidents: a October 2022 call threatening a high school in Washington, a fake May 2023 bomb threat at a historically black college or university in Florida and a July 2023 call in which he falsely identified himself as a federal law enforcement officer who had killed his mother.
He also gave a dispatcher the address of an officer’s residence and threatened to shoot anyone who responded, the Justice Department said.
