A true crime case built from a teenager's price list: $40 for a gas leak, $50 for a major police response, $75 for a bomb threat. Alan Winston Filion — online alias "Torswats" — ran a swatting-for-hire operation from his bedroom in Lancaster, California, starting at age 15. Over 18 months, he made more than 375 swatting calls targeting mosques, schools, historically Black colleges, the Pentagon, members of Congress, and a federal agent's home at 2:45 in the morning.

A private investigator infiltrated his encrypted channels. A gamer recognized his typing patterns from five years earlier. The FBI seized 13 devices — and Filion kept making calls.

In this episode of True Crime Cases You Haven't Heard, host Steve Rhode examines United States v. Alan Winston Filion using federal court documents, the plea agreement, sentencing memoranda, and investigative journalism from WIRED and Vice.

What you'll learn:

• How a 16-year-old built a criminal business with cryptocurrency, AI-generated voices, and caller ID spoofing

• Why it took 12 months from evidence to arrest — and what Filion did with those months

• The sentencing math: 375 calls, no deaths, four years — and whether that's proportional justice

This ethical true crime episode is built entirely from court documents and official records. Case files available exclusively on Substack — search True Crime Unheard.

TrueCrimeUnheard.com

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A PhD from Georgia Tech. A senior ML engineer at Amazon's autonomous vehicle subsidiary. A $250,000 salary. And 300 pounds of explosive materials in the garage of a $1.5 million home, across the street from a high school.

Built from 167 research files and 78 court documents — including the government and defense sentencing memoranda, the indictment, and the judgment — this episode covers how a geofence warrant returned one device in a six-minute window, what investigators found inside 668 Potomac Court, and why fifteen households on life-sustaining medical equipment lost power before anyone knew it was deliberate.

Get the case files at https://truecrimeunheard.com/subscribe

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Built from the federal indictment, five plea agreements, FBI affidavits, and sentencing memoranda filed in United States v. Farah (D. Minn.). Court documents are sent exclusively to subscribers when episodes drop — subscribe at https://truecrimeunheard.com/subscribe