The school shooting was fake, the terrorism was real

Then, between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve, came a new flood of strikes. They struck 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 of Florida. One prank call, court documents later said, caused a car accident that resulted in serious injuries.

But this time, the voice on the calls was not Torsoats. Instead, according to US prosecutors, he organized the operation, providing the names, addresses and phone numbers of the targets to a 21-year-old and a 26-year-old from Serbia and Romania who allegedly organized and carried out the crush. Scheme with Torswats lines fed to them.

It was a familiar text. “I shot my wife in the head with my AR-15,” a man who identified himself as “James” said in one of these calls, targeting the home of Georgia Sen. Jon Albers. He told dispatchers that he caught his wife sleeping with another man, and after killing her, he took the man hostage. He added, “I will release him in exchange for $10,000 in cash,” threatening to detonate pipe bombs 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 Torsoats. And they needed Denise’s help.

According to the plan, the office would ask the father of the teenage suspect to come to the local police station to retrieve the computers they confiscated. Phillips explained that while the father was there, Dennis should use his aggrieved ex-husband persona and start another conversation on Telegram with Turswats about beating his ex-wife. Then he must procrastinate as long as possible to keep Torswats on his computer, logged into his accounts – so the police can break in and arrest him. Dennis agreed, despite having Covid.

Instead, to his and the FBI’s surprise, Torsoats accompanied his father to the police station to pick up his devices. The police calmly arrested him immediately. As was his enemy Finally he was taken into custodyDennis was too sick to celebrate.

The FBI and Justice Department declined WIRED’s request for comment, which included questions about why it took the FBI several months after learning Torsoats’ name — even after searching his home — to arrest him.

After nearly two years of his investigation, Dennis finally learned the teen’s name: Alain Fillion. He saw pictures of Filion for the first time and mentally replaced the image of Dshocker’s face with the image of the actual alleged teenager he was hunting. Like Dshocker, Filion was big. He had long, thin brown hair. He appeared in the photos with wide, innocent eyes.

At the time of his arrest, Filion was 17 years old. When Dennis’s case began, Fillion was only 15 years old.

Booking photo of Alain Fillion

Courtesy of Seminole County Sheriff’s Office

Filion fits the profile of many online delinquents. He, like Dennis, seems to have grown up online, finding community more in niche forums than in the physical world. His high school years were marked by isolation due to pandemic lockdowns. According to Antelope Valley Community College in Lancaster, Fillion began pursuing a mathematics degree in the fall of 2022 after graduating from high school early. But the professor at Antelope Valley barely remembers him at all. One person who knew him says he was quiet, “forgettable” and had few friends.

A person claiming to be Fillion’s friend claims he was part of a group aimed at inciting racial violence and that he sought money to “purchase weapons and commit a mass shooting.” An anonymous tip, filed with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center and obtained by WIRED, claimed that the person behind the Torswats account was involved in a neo-Nazi sect known as the Order of Nine Angles. The tipster claimed that he believed Torsoats’ actions contributed to the “end of days” by “draining the system’s finances and man-hours.”