Alabama Man Catfished Airline Employee on TikTok, Then Called In Bomb Threats at Two Airports

An Alabama man pleaded guilty this week to a scheme so strange it reads like fiction: prosecutors say he catfished an airport employee on TikTok under a fake identity, used the online relationship to extract her phone number and personal details, then used that access to call in bomb threats against two different airports, all while watching the resulting police response unfold in real time through a video call with the woman he had deceived.

Robert Tyler Wicks, 25, of Decatur, Alabama, entered a guilty plea in federal court on September 25, 2026, admitting to a bomb-threat campaign that shut down parts of Bangor International Airport in Maine and disrupted flights at Washington Dulles International Airport over a 24-hour span in February 2025. The case, which investigators eventually unraveled by tracing phone records back through cell towers to Wicks’s hometown, has drawn renewed attention this week as the plea deal became public.

A Fake Identity Called “Trey Live”

According to court documents, Wicks built the entire scheme around a fabricated online persona he used to pursue a relationship with an American Airlines employee based at Bangor International Airport. Operating under the alias “Trey Live,” Wicks met the woman on TikTok and cultivated what she believed was a genuine romantic connection, the kind of online relationship that has become increasingly common and increasingly exploited in the social media era.

The deception went further than a simple catfishing scheme built on a fake name and fabricated photos. At some point during their online relationship, Wicks convinced the employee to participate in a screen-sharing session, during which he was able to obtain her personal contact information along with details about her job and her access at the airport. That single technical maneuver, prosecutors say, gave Wicks everything he needed to set the rest of his scheme into motion.

107 Messages and a 10:50 A.M. Threat

On February 13, 2025, Wicks began bombarding two airline employees, including the woman he had been cultivating online, with a barrage of messages sent directly to their personal phone numbers, numbers he had no legitimate reason to possess. Investigators say he sent 107 messages in total, falsely claiming to have guns and threatening some kind of violent incident at the airport scheduled for 10:50 the following morning.

The sheer volume of messages, sent late into the night to people who had no idea the threats were coming from someone they had been building an online relationship with, set off alarm among airline staff and, eventually, law enforcement, who had to treat the threats as credible regardless of their actual origin.

A Pre-Dawn Call and a Second Airport Targeted

The threats escalated sharply the next morning. At around 5 a.m. on February 14, 2025, Wicks called the switchboard at Bangor International Airport directly, demanding to speak with investigators and claiming that bombs had been placed outside the building on timers, a threat specific and alarming enough to trigger a full security response at the airport.

He did not stop there. Later the same day, Wicks placed a separate call to Washington Dulles International Airport, hundreds of miles away in Virginia, and threatened an explosion there as well, effectively multiplying the scope of the disruption from a single regional airport to a second major hub serving the national capital region.

Watching the Police Respond Through Her Own Phone

Perhaps the most unsettling detail to emerge from the case is how investigators say Wicks was able to describe law enforcement’s response to the threats as it was happening in real time, information he had no legitimate way of knowing unless he was watching it unfold. The answer, according to court filings, was almost absurdly simple: during the chaos at Bangor, police spotted the employee on a live video call on her phone inside the airport, the same video call Wicks was using to watch the police response he himself had manufactured.

That detail transformed the case from a straightforward bomb-threat prosecution into something closer to a live surveillance operation Wicks had built entirely around a relationship he had fabricated from scratch, using the trust and access of a woman who had no idea she was the unwitting mechanism through which her own airport’s lockdown was being monitored by the person responsible for it.

Tracing an iPhone Back to Alabama

Unraveling who was actually behind the threats took investigators through a multi-step forensic process. Agents traced the communications to a specific iPhone, then used cell tower data to narrow the device’s location down to Decatur, Alabama, a city with no obvious connection to either Bangor, Maine, or Washington Dulles. From there, records led investigators to Wicks’s mother, who it turned out had relocated to the area from Tennessee along with her son, providing the link that ultimately connected the device, the location, and the suspect.

That kind of digital forensic trail, piecing together cell tower pings and device records across state lines, has become increasingly central to how law enforcement unwinds threats made anonymously or under a false identity, and this case is a clear example of how even a scheme built on an elaborate fake persona can be undone once investigators start pulling on the technical threads behind it.

The Financial Angle: Stealing From the Woman He Deceived

Beyond the bomb threats themselves, prosecutors say Wicks’s exploitation of the relationship extended into straightforward theft. Using the access and trust he had built up under his fake identity, he also stole money directly from the employee’s bank account, adding a financial crime on top of the elaborate threats-and-surveillance scheme, and underscoring that whatever the original motivation behind the fake “Trey Live” persona was, it ultimately became a vehicle for extracting both money and a strange kind of voyeuristic access to a law enforcement response he had personally triggered.

What the Guilty Plea Means Going Forward

Wicks’s guilty plea, entered September 25, 2026, in federal court, exposes him to a potential sentence of up to five years in prison, a fine as large as $250,000, and three years of supervised release following any prison term. Federal bomb-threat statutes carry serious weight precisely because of the kind of real-world disruption they can cause, regardless of whether an actual device is ever found, and this case produced exactly that kind of disruption across two separate major airports.

The FBI has estimated the direct costs to the airlines involved at approximately $12,189, a figure that captures only a slice of the actual disruption caused. Flights were delayed at both airports across the two days of threats, with one American Airlines flight bound for Washington National arriving a full five hours late as security sweeps and heightened alert protocols worked through the system.

A Multi-Agency Investigation and a Sentencing Still to Come

The Justice Department’s announcement of the guilty plea credits a wide coalition of agencies with unraveling the scheme, including the FBI, the Federal Air Marshal Service, the Bangor Police Department, the Army National Guard, and police departments in both Huntsville and Decatur, Alabama, a reflection of just how many jurisdictions had to coordinate once the threats crossed state lines and implicated multiple airports. Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew McCormack is handling the prosecution out of the District of Maine’s U.S. Attorney’s Office, which announced the plea on September 25, 2026.

No sentencing date has yet been set. Under federal procedure, the U.S. Probation Office will first complete a presentence investigative report examining Wicks’s background, criminal history, and the full scope of harm caused by the scheme, a process that typically takes several months before a judge hands down an actual sentence. Investigators also noted that Wicks used a mobile app specifically designed to mask his real phone number when placing some of the calls, an added layer of technical concealment on top of the fabricated online identity he had already built.

A Case Study in Catfishing’s Real-World Reach

What makes the case resonate well beyond the aviation-security world it unfolded in is how cleanly it illustrates a pattern that has become disturbingly familiar in the social media era: an online relationship built entirely on a fabricated identity, sustained long enough to extract real access and real information, and then weaponized in ways the victim never could have anticipated when the relationship began. The woman at the center of the case was not a bystander Wicks happened to target: she was, by virtue of her job and her unwitting trust in a persona that did not exist, the exact access point his entire scheme depended on.

Aviation security experts and online safety advocates have both pointed to the case as a cautionary example of how screen-sharing, a feature most people treat as an innocuous way to show a partner something on their phone, can become a vector for exactly the kind of information extraction that made the rest of Wicks’s scheme possible. The airport bomb threats grabbed the headlines, but the mechanism that enabled them, a stranger building a fake romantic identity specifically to gain access to someone’s personal information and professional access, is the detail that has turned this from a regional aviation-security story into something with much broader resonance.

Sources

• View From The Wing: American Airlines Employee’s Online Boyfriend Called In Airport Bomb Threats—And Watched Police Respond Live
• U.S. Attorney’s Office, District of Maine: Alabama Man Pleads Guilty to Airport Bomb Threat Hoax