Feb. 11 (UPI) — An 18-year-old Californian, who made hundreds of swatting calls against places of worship and education for profit and fun, was sentenced to four years in prison on Tuesday, federal prosecutors said.
Alan Filion of Lancaster, Calif., was 17 when arrested in January 2024 in his home state on charges stemming from his threat to shoot up a Sanford, Fla., mosque. Claiming to be armed with an illegally obtained AR-15, a Glock pistol, pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails, he told an emergency response number in the city that he vowed to “kill everyone” he saw at the religious institute.
Federal prosecutors, in court documents, said between August 2022 and January 2024, Filion made more than 375 swatting, hoax or threat calls like the one he made to Sanford but throughout the United States.
Swatting involves a perpetrator making a false report of a violent crime with police or emergency services to prompt a law enforcement response to a particular location.
Court documents state that “[o]n numerous occasions, Filion’s swatting activities caused armed police responses to the supposed crime scenes.”
Federal prosecutors said Filion used several Voice over Internet Protocol accounts and, in some cases, employed text-to-speech generators, among other actions, to obscure his identity.
He pleaded guilty in November to four federal charges, under the Federal Juvenile Justice & Delinquency Prevention Act, of making interstate threats in injure others.
In addition to the Sanford swatting incident, he plead guilty to three others — one to a Washington high school in October 2022, a Historically Black College and University in Florida in May 2023 and to a Texas police department.
U.S. District Judge Carlos Mendoza for the Middle District of Florida handed down Filion’s 48-month sentence on Wednesday, the Justice Department said in a statement.
CAIR, the United States’ largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, said in a statement that it welcomed the sentence Filion received and thanked law enforcement for bringing him to justice, though remarked that it is seeing “a rise in bias incident targeting minority communities nationwide, which must be addressed by elected officials and state and local leaders.”