Teen Pleads Guilty To Making 375 'Swatting' Calls Across US (cnn.com) 166
quonset shares a report from CNN: Between August 2022 and January 2024, hundreds of swatting calls were made across the country targeting religious institutions, government offices, schools, and random people. Authorities were finally able to track down the criminal, Alan Fillon, who entered the plea to four counts of making interstate threats to injure the person of another, the US Attorney's Office for the Middle District of Florida said in a news release. He faces up to five years in prison on each count. A sentencing date has not yet been set.
The US 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. Filion was 16 at the time he placed the majority of the calls.
The US 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. Filion was 16 at the time he placed the majority of the calls.
WTF?! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:WTF?! (Score:5, Interesting)
How does a govt agency allow itself to be directed by a teenage prankster?
We spend billions on SWAT and other forms of militarized police.
Much of that money comes from Federal grants.
There isn't much for them to do, but to justify their existence and keep the money flowing, they need to keep up their "incident" count.
So when they receive an anonymous bomb threat, they have no incentive to do any sanity checking or de-escalation. They grab their guns, board the armored infantry vehicle, and go.
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You think that most emergency response units sit around with nothing else to do? That’s their secondary job specifically because there’s not that much to do. In most jurisdictions, they have a volunteer program for the emergency response unit. Those people go through training and they’re on call when they’re not doing that job. They have a normal job within the department.
Re:WTF?! (Score:5, Insightful)
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But maybe thats too much to ask from authoritarians.
Re:WTF?! (Score:4, Insightful)
WTF would have them do, ignore bomb and mass shooting threats?
Well, for starters, sending in a drone or robot instead of heavily armed humans would go a long way to avoid mishaps. It also would be a whole lot less hilarious for the pranksters if SWATting just amounted to the victim telling a robot "nope, no hostage situation here, someone's yanking your chain."
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Sounds like a good way to give someone advanced notice of police arriving.
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WTF would have them do, ignore bomb and mass shooting threats?
Well, for starters, sending in a drone or robot instead of heavily armed humans would go a long way to avoid mishaps. It also would be a whole lot less hilarious for the pranksters if SWATting just amounted to the victim telling a robot "nope, no hostage situation here, someone's yanking your chain."
I just dropped this off here.Here is an actual swatter and their reaction. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Real life swatting is quite a varied thing.
Here is a call to 911 - a woman claiming that a guy is outside her house shooting off his guns and killing things.
Okay, it might be legit - so what do you do? Trying to get her address, she refuses. Now there is a quandary - what if she was really in danger, and you decided not to do anything and it was real - now the police become the bad guys.
Re: WTF?! (Score:2)
I saw that video, and yes, her liquor made her take liberties (quite loud ones, too). You have to be creative when it comes to sentencing for these degenerates. Like using the K9 SUVs while bringing them to the stationDon't worry about Fang, back there; he only goes for the crotch
Re:WTF?! (Score:4, Interesting)
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I'm 53, a Brit and the son of two soldiers.
I went to several BFES (British Forces Education Services) schools in West Germany, back in the day. You may recall that things were quite fraught back then - different to today but also the same. We used to get bomb threats roughly weekly - just at school, it was worse for the troops. Some of those were traced to older kids having a laugh. (lol)
In about 10 years (roughly late '70s to mid '80s) quite a lot happened. I was 10 in 1980.
Anyway, govt agencies have t
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If someone is trying to kick your door in while screaming death threats, you you want the 911 operator to question whether or not it's a real call?
The only way to determine if it's a real call is to have someone on site. That can be handled poorly (and sometimes is), but the only way the system works is to respond to all calls. There's plenty of historical examples of why that is.
(This little shit should get 375 consecutive sentences, and spend the rest of his useless, parasitic life in a 6x9 foot concrete
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If you call 999, does the operator question whether or not it's a real call before sending assistance? Really? And you like it that way?
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This idea of making SWAT calls as if they were armed forces calling in an air-strike is ridiculous.
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If you mean in the UK, yes. The operator keeps the caller on the line the whole time, keeps them talking, & tries to get as much relevant & useful information from the caller as possible.
And what happens if the caller screams and the line goes dead? Or whispers "He's coming" and the line goes dead. Is the response cancelled? What do you believe should happen?
And do feel free to explain how someone doing a swatting call can't do exactly that.
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If someone is trying to kick your door in while screaming death threats, you you want the 911 operator to question whether or not it's a real call?
Since the police's only response in the US is to send lots of people with guns trying to kick your door in while screaming death threats, then yes, absolutely, they should question if it's a real call.
There are a lot of other ways to have someone onsite without a no-knock SWAT raid, but the US police don't want to attempt using any of them. They all want to cosplay soldier despite being unqualified civilians (and cops calling people civilians is a problem - we're not at war, they are municipal public servan
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That's not an issue with 911 responding to all calls, that's an issue with police overreacting. You can't try to solve a problem if you can't identify what it is.
Also, there are an estimated 600,000 911 calls per day. There are not 600,000 police involved shooting from 911 calls per day. So perhaps what you should be questioning is the credibility of the bullshit propaganda you're gobbling down about how "the police's only response in the US (emphasis mine, but an exact quote from your post) is to send lo
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When you have a bunch of hammers [visualcapitalist.com], everything looks like nails.
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"How does a govt agency allow itself to be directed by a teenage prankster?"
Because the govt agency doesn't know it's a teenage prankster, of course. Are you seriously suggesting that emergency calls must be positively identified before they are responded to? You might want to stop and think about the consequences of that.
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Re: WTF?! (Score:2)
What exactly do you suggest the police do? When a 911 call comes in, act sceptical if the call doesn't sound 100% plausible?
Here's what you're asking for:
https://youtu.be/pnD_51Vvi1I [youtu.be]
You sound about as smart as Chief Wiggam.
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Before you tell me that being a police officer isn't actually that dangerous, statistically, let me point out that this statistic is based on our present use of heavily armed trigger happy assault teams. And also that as we've recently discovered, people act much more based on perception than they do on verifiable facts or s
Re: WTF?! (Score:2)
"this statistic is based on our present use of heavily armed trigger happy assault teams."
Is it?
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The police: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me 375 times... "
Unless you're in Tennessee, well, I know it's that way in Texas, I think it's in Tennessee as well. "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me ya can't get fooled again."
Good (Score:2)
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Given my experiences during the past 10-12 months, I'd prefer they focus on shutting down unsolicited political marketers... from either side of the aisle.
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Given my experiences during the past 10-12 months, I'd prefer they focus on shutting down unsolicited political marketers... from either side of the aisle.
Some of the more annoying calls (from both sides) were obvious scams that I'm sure people fell for. "For the next 12 hours only, an anonymous doner will match your contribution 10x!!!" Uh, yeah. It's like sitting in Jita on Eve Online when someone offers to double your ISK. I'm glad the election is over. I think everybody was getting fatigue. *Cue some random statement about "Chito Benito" or Kamala Harris and her alleged ammonia problem.* Ugh.
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I'm glad the election is over.
This has always been my feeling when we get to this time of year, every four years. I realize the governmental structures are somewhat different, but - I envy those countries where they call an election, the candidates politic for a month or so, and then everyone votes and it's over. Our seemingly multiyear presidential campaigns are just ridiculous.
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Has the 2026 midterms campaign kicked off yet?
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We're going to start scheduling these things like the Olympics, with battles planned out 16 years ahead of time.
Re: Good (Score:2)
Playing EVE Online for a while should be a requirement to graduate high school, where you need to earn X amount of money to graduate.
That should cut down on the scams. ... or it creates a while bunch of educated and trained scam artists, of course :)
We need to make examples out of these... (Score:4, Insightful)
We need to make examples out of people like this. If Wells Fargo can stop Tik-Tok people from exploiting check fraud, then the Federal government can do something about terroristic threats and swatting. Otherwise, this will just continue. Loving in a urban area, it is not uncommon for, when an event has tickets sold out, for people to call in a threat just to cause the event to have to be cancelled. Come finals every semester? Yep all classes are stopped and the dogs are brought in.
Re:We need to make examples out of these... (Score:5, Insightful)
We need to make examples out of people like this.
Idiot teenagers don't research sentencing history before doing stupid stuff, so harsh punishment has little deterrent effect.
It is better to put resources into better policing to increase the chance of getting caught, and better systems that allow faster tracking of calls to emergency numbers.
Or, hear me out (Score:5, Insightful)
Demilitarized the police.
Re:Or, hear me out (Score:5, Interesting)
I was never a fan of defunding the police. But demilitarization I am all for. The constitution says no standing army. We need to stop turning the local law enforcement into an army.
Most cities spend half their budget (Score:2)
Don't get me wrong it was a stupid slogan because it makes it sound like you're going to shut down the police. The actual plan was to spend that money on crime prevention instead of a gang of militarized thugs. But as a matter of marketing the phrase defund the police was disastrous.
If you start see
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No standing army "without the consent of the General Assembly". So Congress has to vote for it. They do. This was supposed to combat medieval abuses, where the King would raise an army and have it run rampant and Parliament couldn't do jack about it.
Things have changed. That whole clause is OBE.
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every 2 years we have an omnibus spending bill that re-authorises the army. but its practically auto-penned
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I was never a fan of defunding the police. But demilitarization I am all for. The constitution says no standing army. We need to stop turning the local law enforcement into an army.
Erm... that's what defunding the police meant... stop giving them the (mostly federal) funds to kit out assault teams with high powered rifles, armoured personnel carriers, et al.
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depends on the area... you do realize the portland was promoting completely abolishing the police entirely. NYC started doing the same thing, then suddenly did an about-face when crime went rampant. The problem with 'defunding' was the same problem we had in the military in the 90s when they started slashing military funding. It did nothing to curb spending on special projects like teaching flipper to retrieve torpedos. All it did was cut staffing (billots) down to dangerously low levels. The problem with d
Being a cop (Score:2)
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If there's a real danger, the SWAT team will stand around jerking each other off while the terrorist kills people.
Perhaps some people need a refresher [youtube.com] on their training and experience.
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Re:We need to make examples out of these... (Score:5, Insightful)
Seeing as how he was 16 year old, and without any significant cognitive impairments, he should have known that each of those calls could have resulted in a death. Therefore the charge should not be less than attempted murder, as that's what he was trying to do. Was he trying to kill someone? The answer is yes. It's not reasonable to assume that swatting someone would just be a big scare .. especially not the way he did it. So attempted murder should be the charge and his sentence must either block him from doing more damage, be a deterrence to others, or reform him. We can't have a society where people are walking around that can snap and try to kill someone over disagreements.
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Seeing as how he was 16 year old, and without any significant cognitive impairments, he should have known that each of those calls could have resulted in a death. Therefore the charge should not be less than attempted murder, as that's what he was trying to do.
What the article describes is not attempted murder. Attempted murder is when you report someone with a bloody axe inside the house of an elderly couple - everyone in that house is at a lethal risk. An unknown person dropping a bomb in a school - that is an unknown perpetrator and a few hundred innocent kids - would require different tactics.
Re:We need to make examples out of these... (Score:4, Interesting)
Or we could stop firing police officers for not shooting people. [cnn.com]
Then maybe swatting would be a little less satisfying.
Re:We need to make examples out of these... (Score:4, Insightful)
Those two statements are completely at odds with each other. To be a 16-y.o. boy is, by definition, to have a cognitive impairment.
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Idiot teenagers don't research sentencing history before doing stupid stuff, so harsh punishment has little deterrent effect
You don't need to "research sentencing history". Somebody has an idea, talks about it, and someone more grown up will tell him "that's how you go into jail until you are released in 30 years time aged 45. No sex with a female ever for you'. I had some good idea at 15 what was stupid and what was so far beyond stupid that it wasn't fun anymore (except for the police officers arresting you. They usually have some idea what is what and have a lot of fun kicking in your door and suddenly you have a door and fiv
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juvie till 21 and then what?
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Have you forgotten that public schools are a thing? Teach the kids that they'll catch serious hell for SWATting and yes, then it will be a deterrent. I'm totally for it being a crime tried as an adult, where you can be locked away for a very long time.
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Teach the kids that they'll catch serious hell for SWATting and yes, then it will be a deterrent.
Yes, but "serious hell" doesn't have to be 20 years in adult prison for a 16-year-old kid.
Put an ankle tracker on the kid and have him spend five years (or ten) cleaning bedpans in nursing homes.
That's plenty of deterrent, and the work is a net benefit to society. That's way more sensible than prison.
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What you describe often leads to copycat crimes, which is the opposite of what is intended.
You are presuming that someone who would prank 911 is rational. They are often antisocial and looking for a way to lash out at society or at least get people to notice them.
What you imagine: "That kid did something dumb and was punished. I shouldn't do that."
Reality: "Wow. That kid's is in all the newspapers. Everyone knows his name. I should do the same so people notice me."
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It's not just teenagers. People committing crimes rarely think about being caught, which is why harsh sentences don't have much deterrent effect.
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I disagree. If you make an example the word will spread. There’s a reason why there’s not a high number of deaths related to people sticking their fingers and light sockets with the power on or sticking their fingers in electrical outlets. They have been told that such actions will lead to certain death. so a 16-year-old is fully capable of comprehending that endangering the life of others could result in an eternity in jail. And there is plenty of evidence that swatting somebody can result in
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After three hundred seventy fucking five calls, a few people should be getting fired and a few systems should be getting shitcanned.
He made those calls across the country over a period of a year and a half. How would you like to single out those three hundred plus calls from the billions of other calls made during that time considering none of the officials involved knew about the other calls? On top of which, there were undoubtedly other swatting calls made during that time.
Sure thing champ (Score:2)
https://www.theiacp.org/resour... [theiacp.org].
There are 17,000 police departments across the US. 5,000 SWAT teams. 375 calls across 15 months. Just because a police department doesn't have a SWAT team doesn't mean they don't break down your door and pay you a visit, so we'll use the 17,000 number. Distributed randomly, the odds of him calling the same police department twice are 1 in 45. Even if he called the same police department more than once, it could have been distributed to one of multiple 911 call centers, or p
Re:We need to make examples out of these. (Score:4, Informative)
Billions of SWAT calls?
I didn't say billions of swatting calls. I said billions of calls.
Perhaps you're the one who should grow up so you have reading comprehension because clearly you're not an adult.
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We need to make examples out of people like this. If Wells Fargo can stop Tik-Tok people from exploiting check fraud...
Is this some kind of weird joke? Since when has Wells Fargo ever stopped any kind of fraud, including their own?
Can someone please explain (Score:2, Insightful)
The US allows an unbelievable amount of freedom for individuals to have absolutely insane, hateful views and hobbies. As
Re:Can someone please explain (Score:5, Insightful)
I dont believe for a second that a 16 year old is capable of doing anything more sophisticated than dialing their smartphone.
Not that I think it's necessary because neither LE or telcos are spectacularly competent, nor do I know whether he did anything whatsoever, but I don't think that some basic VoIP tomfoolery is beyond the reach of a 16 year old with enough language skills to read a HOWTO. When some of us were kids that would have been arcane knowledge, now you can probably just ask Google.
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When we were kids we had the 2600 underground newspaper and later on the alt.2600 usenet group. Remember Paladin Press?
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When we were kids we had the 2600 underground newspaper and later on the alt.2600 usenet group.
That's literally my point! Everyone has access to resources like that today. Back in the day you had to know something just to find them.
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there exist online VOIP phone systems.. you can make a call... use a few proxies... sit outside a coffee shops wifi spot.. good luck to the local police force in trying to trace that call, and get accurate logs/IP's/names from any of the services used.
It's actually a surprise that this kid was eventually nailed... and i do hope they nail his a** to the wall and make a spectacle out of it so that anyone thinking of doing it again will know better.
A year in jail per instance is a light sentence. If he spends
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My take is nobody in "law enforcement" actually cared. I mean, they get to brutalize people and demo their shiny tech and look all mean and mighty and they get paid anyways. Why would they take offense?
The US allows an unbelievable amount of freedom for individuals to have absolutely insane, hateful views and hobbies.
You have an exceptionally dangerous stance there. Because think for a moment what it would take to suppress these.
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Quite probably not, for most of them. You don't get the good feelings of doing an actual raid against "bad guys" like drug dealers and such. Nor the positive accolades, plus knowledge of possibly triggering another BLM event and the hassle of that.
But SWAT and bomb squads are specialists. It isn't their job or skill set to track this guy down, thus they have to rely on the FBI and such due to the border crossing interstate nature of the crime
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I am 100% sure you have no idea what you are talking about. And the sort of electronic eaves dropping and intrusion you are advocating usually leaves the right wingnuts to get their panties in twist.
And you have no idea what the capabilities the gov. agencies have to monitor...unless....you have been getting the memos. Care to share? Lay them on us, we can take it.
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I dont believe for a second that a 16 year old is capable of doing anything more sophisticated than dialing their smartphone.
Like 16 year olds in general? Does that include the likes of 16 year olds who hacked the CIA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]? The 16 year old who hacked Apple obfuscated his attacks via a VPN https://www.bitdefender.com/en... [bitdefender.com] . The 16 year old behind Lapsus$ seemed to give cybersecurity experts the run around for a long time https://fortune.com/2022/03/24... [fortune.com]
I think the bigger question is, who did such a poor job schooling you if you were only capable of dialing a number from your smartphone at age 16? Shi
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Started BASIC then assembly Z80 on my ZX81 at 11yo, at 14yo I was cracking games on my Amstrad CPC6128 (still a Z80) and at 16yo cracking on PC (8086), so don't underestimate teens...
Re: Can someone please explain (Score:5, Insightful)
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Someone came along to mod my comment that way unironically, of course.
Slashdot is the post-Elon Twitter of nerd discussion sites.
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punishment (Score:2)
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He plead guilty to 4 counts, that's it - he's accused of committing 375 calls... we shouldn't shoot people "into the sun" over a prosecutors accusations...
voice fingerprints have been around for awhile (Score:2)
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What if he was using the vocal equivalent of cutting letters out of magazines and pasting them onto a note?
I could imagine just doing a text-to-speech thing with a pre-made note. Things have only gotten easier and more believable in that regard in recent years too.
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Don't you think police would question the claim that the caller was in danger, yet had time to (in effect) cut letters from a magazine to report the attack? It would be like an abused spouse mailing a typed letter to the local police to report her abuse...
When the 911 operator detects the callers voice is being run thru auto tune, perhaps they act differently?
Internet clout (Score:3)
Teens are notoriously stupid. Living proof that the brain does not fully mature until later.
The problem is the reach they have in modern times. Previously, they egged the neighbor's car. The neighbor had a pretty good idea who the culprits were, could have a talk with their parents, or call the local police. Today? You can remotely "egg" someone thousands of miles away, for internet clout, or just for sh!ts and giggles. It's a lot harder to find the little SOBs, when they can be literally anywhere.
At the same time, we want to preserve privacy rights. We don't want the government tracking every phone call, reading every message, tracing every internet connection. That would be horrendous (and, yes, too much of it already happens).
What's the solution? Is there one?
"Pleads guilty to 375 'swatting'. Calls"? (Score:2)
Authorities were finally able to track down the criminal, Alan Fillon, who entered the plea to four counts of making interstate threats to injure the person of another, the US Attorney's Office for the Middle District of Florida said in a news release. He faces up to five years in prison on each count. A sentencing date has not yet been set.
Got that, plead guilty to FOUR counts...
The US Attorney's Office said Filion made more than 375 swatting and threat calls from August 2022 to January 2024.
He was ACCUSED of making 375 swatting calls.
Being accused of 375 swatting calls is not the same as pleading guilty to 375 swatting calls. I suspect the prosecutors felt up to a 20 year prison sentence was adequate and only sought convictions on 4 of the claimed 375 calls.
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As a juvenile offender, it's possible that he will be eligible for some sort of parole without serving that many years whic
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Comments are looking at this the wrong way! (Score:2)
2. 911 responders cannot make the determination whether a call is legit. They are required to relay a threat to the responding force. Even if they know the caller is in a different country, they still have to respond.
3. Even if this dude gets one year per count... it still means he goes away indefinitely. I blame all of this o
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Yeah, everyone wants to live in Iran.
Re: Public hanging during halftime (Score:2)
Comrade Xi, we stopped doing that years ago.
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The psychos simply won't care. They will be criminals regardless.
Doing nothing about crime does not make for an enduring civilization. A society only stays civilized by weeding out those that are not civil. Just look at your local stores, do all those caged goods with every visitor treated like a potential criminal look civilized to you?
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The caged goods are a deterrent to living anywhere near a city and shopping at such places.
The retailers know this, and by doing this they are acknowledging that they won't be able to maintain retail presence in that place without such draconian measures. It's the last step before totally pulling out. Like the neighborhood liquor store with inch-thick bulletproof glass and a change exchange depression in the counter.
It's extra special fun hearing people complain about the lack of drug stores or other reta
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You do not know what "prevention" means, do you? Also, research shows _reliably_ that criminals never think they will get caught, and the harsher the penalty, the less they think they will get caught. And no, this does not apply only "psychos". Actual psychos are a lot more careful than the average criminal.
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Death penalty has a tremendous impact on recidivism.
Remember the mass killing in Norway? The young man that went on a killing spree at a youth camp on an island? He killed dozens of people, and "enlightened" Norway, prosecuted him to the fullest extent of their law - he got what, 21 years in prison? [wikipedia.org]
He blew up 8 people when he exploded a bomb in a van, then killed 69 people at the camp... 21 years?
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Should have permitted the family members of the victims to push the guy through the wood chipper themselves.
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You mistake what law and 'justice' systems are about. They are about the *appearance* of justice, and quite a bit of deterrence. True justice is not possible. Deterrence is hit or miss. But absent the attempt at this, people just start killing each other. You don't realize how close society is to that, at any particular moment. So let the people slake their blood thirst on the apparently guilty. Let them defuse the vendetta impulse in some government ceremony. It saves us all problems in the end.
Des
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By having _other_ predatory individuals kill them? Great approach! Also completely immoral. Nice personal accomplishment there too.
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And how exactly are you planning to do that? That has _never_ worked in human history.
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That seems to be the status quo in Chicago - gangbangers killing gangbangers, and the police never seem to convict the killers...