Then, between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve, a new avalanche of blows occurred. They affected nearly a hundred politicians and law enforcement officials in a brazen and coordinated campaign: the Secretary of Homeland Security of the United States, Alejandro Mayorkas, the 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 would later indicate, led to a car accident that caused serious injuries.
But this time, the voice on the calls was not Torswats. Instead, according to U.S. prosecutors, he orchestrated the operation, providing the names, addresses and phone numbers of the targets to a 21- and 26-year-old from Serbia and Romania who allegedly organized and carried out the killing. diagram with lines that Torswats transmitted to them.
It was a familiar script. “I shot my wife in the head with my AR-15,” said a man who identified himself as “James” in one of those calls, directed to the home of Georgia state senator John Albers. He told dispatchers that he had caught his wife sleeping with another man and, after killing her, had taken the man hostage. “I will release him for $10,000 in cash,” he added, threatening to detonate homemade bombs and blow up the house if his demands were not met.
Finally, Phillips called Dennis and told him that the FBI had a plan to arrest Torswats. And they needed Dennis’s help.
Under the plan, the office would ask the father of the teenage suspect to go to a local police station to retrieve the computers they had confiscated. While the father was there, Phillips explained, Dennis should use his old aggrieved ex-husband persona and start another Telegram conversation with Torswats about crushing his ex-wife. He would then have to wait as long as possible to keep Torswats on his computer, logged into his accounts, so the police could break in and arrest him. Dennis, despite being sick with Covid, agreed.
Instead, to his and the FBI’s surprise, Torswats accompanied his father to the police station to pick up his devices. The police quietly arrested him on the spot. When his nemesis was finally stopped, Dennis was too sick to celebrate.
Both the FBI and the Justice Department declined WIRED’s request for comment, which included questions about why it had taken the FBI so many months after learning Torswats’ name, even after searching his home, to arrest him.
Nearly two years into his investigation, Dennis finally learned the teen’s name: Alan Filion. He saw photos of Filion for the first time and mentally replaced the image of Dshocker’s face with that of the alleged teenage flyswatter he had been hunting. Like Dshocker, Filion was big. He had long, straight brown hair. In the photos, she showed an innocent expression with wide eyes.
At the time of his arrest, Filion was 17 years old. When Dennis’ case began, Filion was only 15 years old.
Filion fits the profile of many online criminals. He, like Dennis, seemed to have grown up online, finding community in niche forums rather than in the physical world. His high school years were defined by the isolation of pandemic lockdowns. According to Antelope Valley Community College in Lancaster, Filion began pursuing a bachelor’s degree in mathematics in the fall of 2022 after graduating high school early. But one Antelope Valley teacher could barely remember it. A person who knew him says he was quiet and “forgettable,” with few friends.
A person who claims to be a friend of Filion alleges that he was part of a group that aimed to incite racial violence and was seeking money to “buy guns and commit a mass shooting.” An anonymous tip, submitted to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center and obtained by WIRED, alleged that the individual behind the Torswats account was involved in a neo-Nazi sect known as the Order of Nine Angles. The whistleblower stated that he believed Torswats’ actions were contributing to the “end of days” by “bleeding the system’s finances and working hours.”