Serial swatter made hundreds of false bomb threats targeting schools, religious facilities

A California teen pled guilty on Thursday to making hundreds of false emergency calls to police for more than two years – claiming imminent threats of bombings, mass shootings, and other violent crimes – and even offered his swatting services for a fee.

The FBI says the Lancaster, California resident Alan W. Filion, now 18-years-old, pled guilty in federal court to making more than 375 swatting and threat calls to police across the nation – including in California, Florida, Texas, and Washington state – between August 2022 to January 2024.

The serial swatter has targeted everything from religious institutions, high schools, colleges and universities, government officials, and numerous innocent individuals, the FBI and Secret Services said.

Swatting is when a person falsely reports an emergency to public safety with the intent of getting a “SWAT team” response to a location where no emergency exists, according to a US National 911 public safety program bulletin.

Officials say Filion would claim to have either planted bombs or threatened to detonate bombs, claim to have firearms, and/or threaten to carry out mass shootings at the targeted locations, spinning up “large-scale deployments” of emergency personnel.

During these swatting calls, Filion would give 911 dispatchers a fake name, among other false statements.

In some cases, armed police officers would approach and enter targeted residences with their weapons drawn, falsely arresting individuals at those residences.

“Swatting poses a severe danger to first responders and victims, wastes significant time and resources, and creates fear in communities," said FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate.

Furthermore, deployed law enforcement and 911 operators spending time on the phone with Filion, would then be unavailable to respond to other emergencies “causing chaos and endangering those communities,” he said.

Swatting for Hire

Filion, who was arrested at the age of 17 and has been in custody ever since, told the FBI he made his first swatting call back in 2020, and soon after decided to profit off his handiwork, offering to make the false emergency calls to police for a fee.

Apparently, Filion would advertise his swatting services on various social media platforms.

In one of those social media posts from January 2023, the FBI said Filion bragged that when he swats someone, he “usually get[s] the cops to drag the victim and their families out of the house, cuff them, and search the house for dead bodies.”

Filion pled guilty on Thursday in Los Angeles to four counts of making interstate threats to injure the person of another and faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison on each count.

One of those threats to a religious institution in Sanford, Florida on May 2023, led to his arrest in California on January 18th of this year.

During the swat, Filion claimed to have an "illegally modified AR-15, a Glock 17 pistol, pipe bombs, and Molotov cocktails," and that he was going to “commit a mass shooting” and “kill everyone” he saw, the FBI said.

The three other counts involved swat calls made to a public high school in Washington involving a mass shooting and bomb threat hoax in 2022; a fake call to a Historically Black College & University in Northern Florida claiming another bomb threat in May 2023; and finally, a July 2023 call to a local police department in western Texas, in which Filion “falsely identified himself as a senior federal law enforcement officer who had killed his mother and threatened to kill any police officers who responded to the scene.”

Sentencing for Filion is scheduled for February 11th, 2025, officials said.