The illegal practice of swatting has been with us for a while now, unfortunately. As most of you likely know, swatting is when someone pretends to call the police from that target’s home and reports a shooting or hostage situation, hoping that the cops will show up and kill the target for them. The practice has become increasingly common in recent years. Unfortunately, we rarely hear about anyone being arrested for it. An exception to that rule turned up this week, however. A 17-year-old from California was arrested and accused of hundreds of incidents of swatting around the country. Alan Winston Filion was taken into custody and extradited to Florida to face charges of swatting a mosque. So how did the FBI manage to find this guy? (NBC News)

A California teenager who is allegedly behind a flurry of swatting incidents across the country targeting schools and the homes of FBI agents has been arrested in connection with a swatting attempt at a Florida mosque last year, according to court documents filed by state prosecutors.

Alan Winston Filion, 17, was arrested earlier this month at his home in Lancaster, California, and extradited to Florida on Tuesday, court documents say. He was charged as an adult on four felonies, including charges related to false reporting that triggered law enforcement response.

Filion entered a not guilty plea to the charges. He is being held without bail at the John E. Polk Correctional Facility.

The reason swatting is typically so difficult to track down is that callers employ “spoofing” to make it look as if the call is coming from the intended target’s phone. Such a thing would have been virtually impossible back in the days when all phones were hard-wired on landlines and calls were routed through physical switches. But now calls are passed over the internet through a stream of computers. Pretty much everyone is hackable. However, the FBI has a few tricks up its sleeve, and they do manage to track down a few people.

It’s not hard to imagine why they were particularly motivated to find Filion. The explanation is right in the first sentence of the linked report. It wasn’t because he was targeting schools or a mosque. He was swatting “the homes of FBI agents.” He also called in a bomb threat to the FBI Criminal Justice Information Services Division in West Virginia. Swatters can probably target you or me without too much to worry about. But when someone goes after the Bureau’s own agents, they are all over the case like flies on roadkill.

Of course, Filion didn’t exactly make it difficult for the law to track him down. He was reportedly advertising his swatting services for sale on Telegram. He even posted recordings of previous swatting calls he’d placed to demonstrate the quality of his “work.” He targeted victims in dozens of states, including reports of bomb threats at schools. The swatting of the mosque in Florida could have turned out tragically were it not for the fact that the police arrived and found a woman and her children at the entrance. After speaking to them they realized the call had been a hoax.

The FBI had Filion in their database and discovered that he had other targets lined up. He planned on swatting Supreme Court Justices and Senators. But his rampage may finally be over now that he’s in custody. He’s being charged as an adult and will face significant prison time if convicted. Filion has pleaded not guilty.