Enlarge / Booking photo of Alan Filion, charged with multiple felonies connected to a "swatting" incident at the Masjid Al Hayy Mosque in Sanford, Florida. (credit: Seminole County Sheriff's Office )

Police suspect that a 17-year-old from California, Alan Filion, may be responsible for "hundreds of swatting incidents and bomb threats" targeting the Pentagon, schools, mosques, FBI offices, and military bases nationwide, CNN reported .

Swatting occurs when fraudulent calls to police trigger emergency response teams to react forcefully to non-existent threats.

Recently extradited to Florida, Filion was charged with multiple felonies after the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office (SCSO) traced a call where Filion allegedly claimed to be a mass shooter entering the Masjid Al Hayy Mosque in Sanford, Florida. The caller played "audio of gunfire in the background," SCSO said , while referencing Satanism and claiming he had a handgun and explosive devices.

Enlarge / An FBI agent takes a photo of a memorial for victims of a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School on May 27, 2022, in Uvalde, Texas. Police were criticized for delaying for more than an hour confronting the shooter. Such criticism has led some police to respond more aggressively to hoax school shooting calls. (credit: Michael M. Santiago / Staff | Getty Images North America )

Within the past year, there have been approximately five times more school shooting hoaxes called in to police than actual school shootings reported in 2023.

Where data from Everytown showed "at least 103 incidents of gunfire on school grounds" in 2023, The Washington Post recently uncovered what seems to be a coordinated campaign of active shooter hoaxes causing "swattings"—where police respond with extreme force to fake crimes—at more than 500 schools nationwide over the past year. In just one day in February, "more than 30 schools were targeted," The Post reported.

Education safety experts and law enforcement officials told The Post that this "wave of school shooting hoaxes" is unprecedented. And Drew Evans, the superintendent of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, warned that just because there's no shooter, that does not mean these schools aren't endangered by the hoaxes.

Enlarge (credit: Roberto Machado Noa / Contributor | LightRocket )

Last month, the FBI created a national online database to finally start coordinating law enforcement reports about "swatting" attacks nationwide, NBC News reported yesterday.

Swatting is a form of domestic terrorism that is sometimes deadly and has become more widespread in the US, according to a March report from Hal Berghel, a computer science professor at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Berghel's report defined swatting as:

A malicious act that involves making fraudulent 911 calls to cause emergency response teams, such as law enforcement special weapons and tactics teams, or SWAT teams (that’s where the gerund’s root comes from), to react forcefully to a nonexistent public threat.

Scott Schubert, of the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services, told NBC News that the database will help combat the growing swatting problem by facilitating "information sharing between hundreds of police departments and law enforcement agencies across the country pertaining to swatting incidents."

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Federal prosecutors have charged two men with allegedly taking part in a spree of swatting attacks against more than a dozen owners of compromised Ring home security cameras and using that access to livestream the police response on social media.

Kya Christian Nelson, 21, of Racine, Wisconsin, and James Thomas Andrew McCarty, 20, of Charlotte, North Carolina, gained access to 12 Ring cameras after compromising the Yahoo Mail accounts of each owner, prosecutors alleged in an indictment filed Friday in the Central District of California. In a single week starting on November 7, 2020, prosecutors said , the men placed hoax emergency calls to the local police departments of each owner that were intended to draw an armed response, a crime known as swatting.

On November 8, for instance, local police in West Covina, California, received an emergency call purporting to come from a minor child reporting that her parents had been drinking and shooting guns inside the minor’s home. When police arrived at the residence, Nelson allegedly accessed the residence’s Ring doorbell and used it to verbally threaten and taunt the responding officers. The indictment alleges the men helped carry out 11 similar swatting incidents during the same week, occurring in Flat Rock, Michigan; Redding, California; Billings, Montana; Decatur, Georgia; Chesapeake, Virginia; Rosenberg, Texas; Oxnard, California; Darien, Illinois; Huntsville, Alabama; North Port, Florida; and Katy, Texas.

Enlarge (credit: Joe Raedle / Staff | Getty Images News )

Yesterday, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) tweeted to sound the alarm that she had been "swatted" around 1 am. "Swatting" is a term for incidents that involve a false report of emergencies like suicide or gun violence that leads police to send a SWAT team or armed tactical unit to enter a person's home, often with guns drawn.

A Rome Police Department report from Wednesday confirmed there was an "attempted swatting," where five officers responding to a report of possible gun violence used a "tactical approach" before ringing the doorbell on Greene's residence. They said they knew it was her house before they arrived but didn't kick the door down like they might during an actual swatting because they "were still unsure" of "exactly what had transpired." A few minutes later, Greene answered the door and sent the police away after they performed a quick wellness check in the house to ensure there was no threat.

Today, Greene tweeted again , saying that she was swatted again.

Enlarge (credit: Vesnaandjic | E+ )

A lot of scrutiny has been placed on how Twitch handles users' reports after being targeted by extreme hate campaigns. Last year, the livestreaming service started suing users conducting “hate raids” that rely on bots to spew a continual barrage of hate speech, “targeting black and LGBTQIA+ streamers with racist, homophobic, sexist, and other harassing content.” Now, vulnerable users are hoping that Twitch will use its industry heft to help effect more change and stop some of the deadliest attacks affecting marginalized users on the platform: swatting that has reportedly been increasing since 2015 and now happens multiple times a week .

These swatting attacks are conducted by anonymous persons making prank calls to police, falsely reporting emergency circumstances (like an armed potential mass shooter or hostage situation that doesn’t exist) in order to get SWAT teams to descend, with guns out, on a Twitch streamer’s location. The Washington Post reported this week that these swattings are seemingly intensifying and traumatizing for any Twitch streamers targeted, who are aware that swattings can be deadly. One trans Twitch streamer told the Post that police in London aimed an assault rifle at her face .

Official attempts to prevent swatting

Back in 2017, a Twitch user died after a swatting. The Twitch user who set up the swatting, Casey Viner, was sentenced to 15 months in prison, while the man whom Viner hired to place the prank call, Tyler Barriss, was sentenced to 20 years .