LOS ANGELES (AP) — A California teenager was sentenced Tuesday to four years in prison in a case involving hundreds of swatting calls, including to a Florida mosque among other institutions and individuals, federal prosecutors said.
Alan W. Filion, 18, pleaded guilty in November to four counts of making interstate threats to injure the person of another. Swatting is the practice of making a prank call to emergency services in an attempt to get a large number of armed police officers dispatched to a particular address.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office said Filion made more than 375 swatting and threat calls from August 2022 to January 2024. Those calls included ones in which he claimed to have planted bombs in targeted locations or threatened to detonate bombs and/or conduct mass shootings at those locations, prosecutors said.
He targeted religious institutions, high schools, colleges and universities, government officials and people across the United States, prosecutors said. Filion, of Lancaster, north of Los Angeles, was 16 at the time he placed the majority of the calls.
As part of a plea agreement, he admitted to calls including an October 2022 one to a public high school in Washington state, in which he threatened to commit a mass shooting and claimed to have planted bombs throughout the campus.
He also pleaded guilty to a May 2023 call to a historically black college and university in Florida, in which he claimed to have placed bombs in the walls and ceilings of campus housing.
Another incident involved a July 2023 call to a local police department dispatch center in Texas, in which he falsely identified himself as a senior federal law enforcement officer, provided the officer’s residential address to the dispatcher, claimed to have killed the federal officer’s mother, and threatened to kill any responding police officers.
