In perhaps the largest swatting case to ever be prosecuted, an 18-year-old from Lancaster, California, has pleaded guilty to federal charges stemming from a nationwide spree of hundreds of shooting and bomb threat hoaxes that sent police scrambling to high schools, courthouses, and the homes of law enforcement officials. Alan Winston Filion now faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison for each of four counts of making interstate threats to injure the person of another, according to the United States Department of Justice. Early this year, Filion was arrested and extradited to Seminole County, Florida. At the time, state prosecutors charged Filion with four state-level felony counts stemming from a single incident in which, prosecutors allege, Filion told a Sanford Police Department dispatcher that he was armed with pipe bombs and an AR-15 rifle and was walking into Masjid Al Hayy Mosque to kill everyone he saw. According to the plea agreement, between approximately August...
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