Then, between Christmas Eve and New Year's, a new spate of floods occurred. They hit nearly a hundred politicians and law enforcement officials in a brazen, coordinated campaign: U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Jane Easterly, Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, and Republican Senator Rick Scott. Court documents later revealed that one of the prank calls caused a car accident, resulting in serious injuries.
But this time, the voice on the call was not Torsweat's. Instead, according to US prosecutors, he carried out the operation by providing the names, addresses and phone numbers of the targets, 21-year-old and 26-year-old youths from Serbia and Romania, who allegedly carried out the attack. The plan was fed to them along the Torsvats lines.
It was a familiar script. “I shot my wife in the head with my AR-15,” a man identifying himself as “James” said in one such call, targeting the home of Georgia state senator John Albers. He told dispatchers that he had caught his wife sleeping with another man and held the man hostage before murdering her. He said, “I will release him on payment of $10,000 in cash.” He threatened to detonate a pipe bomb and blow up the house if his demands were not met.
Finally, Phillips calls Dennis and tells him that the FBI has a plan to arrest Torsvats. And they needed Dennis' help.
According to the plan, the bureau would ask the father of their teenage suspect to come to the local police station to retrieve the computers they had seized. While the father was there, Phillips explained, Dennis should use his old victimized ex-husband persona and start another Telegram conversation with Torsvats about attacking his ex-wife. He must then keep Torswatts on his computer, logged into his accounts, for as long as possible – so that the police can take immediate action and arrest him. Dennis agreed, despite being sick with COVID.
Instead, to his and the FBI's surprise, Torsvats accompanied his father to the police station to pick up his devices. The police quietly arrested him on the spot. As was his slavery finally taken into custodyDennis was too ill to celebrate.
Both the FBI and the Justice Department declined WIRED's requests for comment, including the question of what would have allowed the FBI to arrest Torswet — even searching his home — after knowing his name. Why did it take so many months?
Nearly two years into his investigation, Dennis finally learns the teen's name: Alan Fillion. He saw the photos of Fillion for the first time and mentally replaced the image of DeShocker's face with the actual alleged sweater teen he was hunting. Like DeShocker, Fillion was also big. She had long, light brown hair. In the pictures, she showed an innocent expression with big eyes.
At the time of his arrest, Filion was 17 years old. When Dennis' affair began, Fillion was only 15 years old.
Fillion fits the profile of many online criminals. He, like Dennis, appears to have grown up online and finds community in specific forums more than in the physical world. His high school years were defined by the isolation of pandemic lockdowns. According to Antelope Valley Community College in Lancaster, Fillion is set to pursue a degree in mathematics in the fall of 2022 after graduating early from high school. But one Antelope Valley professor hardly remembers that. A person who knew him says he was quiet and “forgetful” with some friends.
A man claiming to be a friend of Fillion alleges that he was part of a group aimed at inciting racial violence and that he had asked for money to “buy weapons and carry out mass shootings”. An anonymous tip submitted to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center and obtained by WIRED alleged that the person behind the Torswatts account was involved in the neo-Nazi cult known as the Order of Nine Angles. The tipster claimed he believed Torsvats' actions were contributing to “the end of days” by “draining the system's finances and man-hours.”