I once got an email sent from my own email that someone has my password, they even wrote the password in the email of the email, saying has access to all my contacts and social media and that has made a compilation of the porn i watched while masturbating and it’ll be send to everyone if i tell the police or anyone, he/she/they whoever wanted some chunk of BTC to be sent in a crypto wallet address, i panicked and later on I found out it’s some sort of a scam
We were popular enough in our prime that we attracted the attention of a hacking collective.
They held the site hostage for money, they wanted to be paid a “consulting fee” of several thousand dollars to go away and stop taking the site down, fucking with our users, and performing all sorts of hacks to scrape personal information. They insisted that other sites (IMVU was the example given) had paid their fee in order to be left alone.
One of them reached out to me and threatened me by revealing several pieces of my personal information and claiming they had much more, including my bank account information.
We couldn’t pay them, that’s the thing they didn’t realize, we literally didn’t have the amount they were asking for. The site was being poorly managed and was on its last legs.
I saw the site going under slowly and wanted out, I was under a lot of stress, I was being contacted by people who I assumed to be dangerous. My boss was up my ass about stuff, so I just walked away – best decision I ever made.
Back in the day I had a stalker that would follow me on different social media and would make new aim accounts whenever I blocked her. We never met in person except in passing. When I was in marching band she’d be in the stands and shout my name to try to get my attention. She kept stalking me until I was like 23.
I once was messing around in audacity and was singing and listening back and while I was I heard in tts “nice singing f*****” I have never yanked a ethernet cable out so fast. Completely wiped that pc.
I was ACTIVELY stalked by a guy on all imaginable social media when I was 18, at some point I even thought he would show up at my door and kill me.
He would make random people (girls too) message me and tell that he’s around my area and that I must meet up with him immediately if I don’t want any trouble. I had to delete all my socials and become a literal recluse to escape his ass
It’s not scary now but at the time it was. I was 9 maybe and was super into Animal Jam. This girl and I became friends through it, but then she found my YouTube channel and lowkey started internet stalking me (my username in both places was the same). Then one day I logged onto Animal Jam and she was acting all sad, said she was “quitting life,” and then logged out and never logged on again for the few years I continued playing
This was AOL instant messenger, around 1999 or 2000. I accepted a message request from someone whose screen name I didn’t recognize. I opened the message and the message read that In 10 seconds, my computer was going to get hijacked. Around 10 seconds later, the hard disk drive lit and was making all kinds of noise. I panicked, turned off and unplugged everything. I turned the computer back on later and everything seemed fine.
As a 12 year old I was talking to someone over 21 who as an adult I most definitely realized was a pedo. Glad I didn’t meet up or anything. The Internet is scary.
I used to be Admin of Minecraft server. Owner owned a HUGE ddosing site. It’s shutdown by FBI already. But when I left the server and resigned as an Admin. The owner got all my personal info and was mailing home threats to me. He also ddos’ed me offline for 3 months straight.
I didn’t believe this was about me until I was recently reminiscing about high school. He has threatened to call in a fake bomb threat to my high school. In that same time, our school shutdown due to a bomb threat. I have a feeling it was about me, but I never got in trouble about it or anything.. Nothing happened since.
I was a victim of sexploitation a couple of years ago. Sent a bunch of my nudes to a gc on Instagram of all my friends saying that I was sending pics to a minor. Most terrifying few hours of my life. I have not returned to Instagram since
When YouTube first came out my friend and I watched a video of 2 guys doing a drive by shooting. We were like holding each other crying. We watch someone die online.
I’m an admin of a local Facebook group. I deleted someone’s post and he went batshit crazy on me. Because it’s a local (small rural community) group there was a good chance he knew where I worked and possibly even where I lived. He threatened me and my daughter… all because I deleted his facebook post.
I called the police and they said they can’t do anything unless he actually does something. They said he probably wouldn’t and indeed he didn’t. I found others who know him and apparently he threatens people a lot but does nothing. I assume he’s a drinker
I had inadvertently left my zoom room open (and minimized) after checking some settings. Imagine my alarm when I heard my male coworker say “hey what’s up” when he arrived 5 minutes earlier for a zoom meeting… and I was pumping breast milk!
(Not the kind of scary you were talking about, I’m sure… but it sure freaked me out!)
Thankfully my camera angle was such that he didn’t see anything scarring. When he asked “is that a 3D printer I hear running?” I said No and changed the subject.
My husband’s ex-girlfriend managed to use my phone’s location services to stalk me when we first started dating.
She went to the 3 locations I posted most from – my house, my job as house coordinator for a neurodivergent young man with paranoid schizophrenia, and my mom’s house.
I get sick to this day thinking about how close she came to finding my client’s house – you had to know exactly which hidden road to turn – and what she would’ve done. His doctors speculated that if he went into catatonia, he would not ever be coming back. She could have literally scared him to death (which the state mental hospital would’ve been for him. And us! That’s our boy!).
I say this because she tried breaking into my mother’s house next and got my mom put on a psych hold bc my mom had just taken her Ambien when she heard her, and by the time the cops showed up my poor mom was out of her mind with fear, so they took her to the hospital. I had to beg them to release her to me.
And then finally, she came back, broke into my car, trashed it, and that’s what she needed to move on, I guess.
I absolutely do not play with location services. Turn that shit off.
ETA: how’d we know it was her? Dipshit left HER location services on, plus she was still on my husband’s plan when we met, so we pulled it up and yep, she hit all 3 :/
There’s a good chance she’s on Reddit so just in case: it’s still on sight, bitch.
Got sent the “anne.jpg” link at 2pm and I opened it. I had my headphones on at a high volume setting, my browser was full screen, and it was pitch black. It was the worst jumpscare of my life, and the only one that physically made me feel sick.
For those who don’t know what it is, it’s just the “jeff the killer” image flashing rapidly on full screen while blasting an extremely loud, constant scream sound effect. Not too bad if you expect it, but out of nowhere, coupled with the sound effect it scared the living shit out of me. The link itself doesn’t exist anymore but the picture has become infamous since.
Something more light-hearted: Someone tried to sextort me with garbage data aka they used the fake name, fake address, separate user, and separate pass I use for online accounts. Even better: they were using a compromised account of some poor SOB.
So, not scary. It was kind-of funny. “Yes I am Turd Ferguson. You know the difference between you and a mallard with a cold?”
I got doxxed on 4chan for posting a pic I took with metadata – nothing crazy, just something ghostly looking in the window reflection that I thought I’d share on the paranormal board. Someone posted my full name and address and my friend basically went through and commented on every thread til it fell off, but I never went back cause nooo thanks.
When I was 15, my friends and I went into the deep web and downloaded some PDFs and videos about Python programming, and another bullshit things that I can’t remember
The files were all empty
The next day, my friend (we were using his computer) said his entire workspace had been deleted
Three days later, he told us at school that everything on his computer came back
And on his desktop wallpaper, there was a message:
“We checked your whole computer. You seem like a nice guy, just trying to learn Python. Here’s the material. Be more careful when using the dark web”
And all the missing files were placed on his desktop
I did this to myself by accident when I was in high school. I made a shower video to my bf at the time and it showed EVERYTHING. I tried to send it to him, but the steam and condensation that was on my phone made me miss click and it sent to my public story. I don’t know if y’all ever had your phone with you in the shower, but the condensation makes it annoying to try and click on things without miss click. I didn’t know until my mom ran upstairs and yelled at me pretty bad. I looked at my phone and it blew up. Friends from school, KIDS from my dance class and family were texting me all worried. Random people saving it and screenshotting it. I obviously deleted it, but that didn’t stop the video going around part of my grade and now I’m afraid to bring my phone into the shower. Afraid to have my phone anywhere near the shower. I cringe while I shower thinking about that stupid moment.
On my neighborhood’s social media account, I posted a video of a person knocking at my door at 3am and acting strange. All I did was ask if they came to anybody else’s house and what they might have wanted, because I slept through the whole thing. Then this guy, who lives down the street and who I never met in my life, wrote all of these angry, hateful replies to my post, criticizing me with long lectures for not opening my door for the stranger despite my being asleep, stirring up a huge amount of hate toward me, telling other people in the replies he himself had a gun, and then he DMed me with his address and number and told me to come over and meet him in person. I told him to never contact me again and wrote nothing else. Then he found my work email and LinkedIn account and started sending me messages with his number and address, asking me to meet with him. I called my friend over because I was shaking in terror. He definitely knew where I lived based on the video. I thought about calling the police, but I ignored him and he stopped. I immediately deleted my social media account. All I did was post a video asking who the person at my door could have been. Never doing it again.
I was playing a game on xbox and there were a bunch of kids in the lobby being obnoxious as fuck and i said something to my wife on the couch next to me along the lines ‘heez the kids in this lobby are annoying as fuck’ and of them just started listing of my full name, address, my work address, license plate number and saying ‘i should be nicer if i knew what was good for me’ this all happened within like 15 seconds. I just turned off the xbox after that. My gamer tag was also linked to a burner email with no discernable information on the tag or email.
Out of the blue someone on steam messaged me, “hi [insert full real name].” And a story how he took his time to link a whole bunch of random information and match my interests (steam, reddit, other forums) to figure out who I was, where I was from, what I did. This took him weeks apparently. Why? Just to tell me how easy it was to track someone down.
Back out ’97 I was on a wrestling board and posted that I was going to an ECW show near me. This guy kept replying with a million questions on the venue, the show, the talent – anything. I tried to keep up and he said something like “You convinced me to go. I’ll bring my kids.” I’m like “good for you” and didn’t give it much thought.
The day of the event hits and I’m walking up with my group, The ECW crowd isn’t exactly family friendly and there’s a big line to get in for the GA seats. It was fine and we’re all just happy to be there when I hear this voice calling my name. I look up and it’s the guy at the front of the line making a “come up” motion.
Years ago on a different reddit account I posted in a sub asking about a copy of a book I was looking to buy and I had someone reply to me with my full first and last name and email address with the caption “this you?” I still have no idea how they found that info based on what was on my account or why they did it. The mods deleted the comment pretty fast, but it was extremely unnerving.
I stole my mom’s credit card info to be able to access a Cam-girl website when I was like 13 or 14 years old. I got into a private room with one of them and racked up about $25 worth of charges pretty quickly. Needless to say, when I had “the mental clarity” to realize how fucking stupid I had just been, I logged out of the website and proceeded to shit a metaphorical brick.
I put my mom’s credit card back and stayed quiet about it until a few weeks later, she asked me about it when going over her bill. Fortunately, it wasn’t a “Girls Girls Girls!” named website, it sounded more technical, so I told her I accidentally bought something on World of Warcraft (she let me use her credit card for that and I did chores to pay for my subscription), and I gave her $25 cash from birthday money, and claimed I forgot to tell her the day I did it because she wasn’t home at the time.
That cam-girl showed me things I had never seen before…
Back in the 2010’s, when me and a friend at the time who cosplayed were trolling Omegle during a sleepover for laughs, someone there almost correctly guessed the city I lived in with some kinda tool he was using. He was technically still wrong, but it was only like aprovince or two of my country over. like, I COULD’VE GONE TO THAT CITY HE GUESSED BY TRAIN.
Like, back then, doxing was not as popular yet, and we hadn’t told him anything identifying during the chat at all. Nor had we posted anything remotely identifying on social media on that one. So it was TERRFYING. 😬
When I was maybe 15, I was on a kid’s website and was talking to a lot of people and making online friends for the first time. There was this one person with a girl’s name who had a bunch of bad furry art on their profile and tried to talk to me a lot. I was a bit weirded out by them, but I didn’t want to be mean so I chatted with them occasionally. Thankfully, since it was on a kid’s website, every conversation was public, and someone reached out to tell me that apparently this person was a pedo. They didn’t offer proof, but I had a strong gut feeling that they were telling the truth, so I told the person I knew what they were and to stop talking to me. They basically disappeared from the site after that. It’s not that scary now, but at 15 I was really freaked out and didn’t talk to people I didn’t already know on that site for a while. Looking back, I’m realizing that that person in no way talked like a teenage girl. I’m glad the person didn’t manage to get me off the kid’s site and start DMing me creepy shit because that would have been super traumatic
Someone posted in my state’s subreddit about purchasing a gun/guns. The exact details of the post are kinda blurry now because this happened when my first son was really little so it was at least 2 years ago and I was also constantly sleep deprived. But suffice to say, something was OFF about the post and the person’s responses to the post. I called them out, told everyone on the sub that I thought the person was up to no good, and contacted moderators. Mods confirmed that the person was having some shady interactions elsewhere on reddit. At this point the OP starts DMing me getting increasingly irate and aggressive until I finally block them.
Didn’t think too much about it until this story started unfolding and I had a weird feeling about it. I did some research and now have reason to believe that it was this person who moved to my state to secure guns for her cult.
Back in the early 00’s I was running windows XP and zone alarm security suite which was a firewall/traffic monitor. I had an external HDD with everything on it. Music, personal information, banking stuff, home pictures and video…. It was my catch all.
Anyways, one day I’m chilling there and I notice my out traffic spike through the roof. I wasn’t doing anything to trigger that and I panicked. Started digging in and couldn’t find which program was causing it. Disabled my Ethernet port and it instantly stopped. Plugged it back in and within a minute it came back. Unplugged my external drive and it stopped again. Took my computer offline for several hours while I dug in. I had a Trojan backdoor virus which was dumping all of my data from my E:. I don’t know what or how much they got before I interrupted it but I reformatted and put up additional safe guards after that. Thank God I had ZA installed or I would have never even known.
I would like to add that I had a very reputable Anti-Virus installed with updated definitions, not Mcafee or Norton. As well as Spybot S&D. Don’t know when or how I got infected with the TH.
I commented on a cars thread and said something was mid trim level and the guy went off on me. Saying how I could never afford an $110k car and how I should stay in the kitchen where I belonged. He took it a step forward a couple hours later and said that I shouldn’t be talking about cars and things I didn’t know about and how I should be watching my two children (he named their names). He then messaged me a street view of my house.
Went to the cops, started a case, got a restraining order against him.
I used to go on chat rooms in the early 00s I was very young like 11-12 and I used to talk to people a lot. This one guy was really odd and I can’t remember what I did but I pissed him off so he somehow hacked my hotmail account and found out my postcode and address and everything and kept posting it in the chat room. Nothing else happened and eventually MSN chat rooms got closed down
Probably Facebook market place. I was selling a computer on Facebook marketplace place and I scheduled a meetup with someone to sell the computer. The meet up happened at 8pm and when I went to the meetup location, it was in the back of a truck depot that looked a little empty. I got sketchy vibes but im thinking nothing bad is going to happen. I stayed in my car and messaged the guy that I was here to sell the computer. He said ok give me 5 minutes. I hopped out of my car and started walking around and I saw this dirty white van (like it had a mud white color to it). I was facing the front of the van and the engine turned on and my instinct kicked in to get out of there immediately. So I started walking back to my car, and this van was following me. Hopped in my car and drove off and the van followed me for about 6 or 7 miles before I lost it on the freeway. I went back to Facebook messenger and the guy had blocked me or deleted his profile. I started to conceal carry from that point going forward after that experience.
When I was about 20 or 21 I started to come to terms with my sexuality and decided to try out a gay dating/hookup website (early days of online dating – I’m old). It was location based so all the people I was chatting with were in my home area. I had a few conversations that didn’t really go anywhere, then got chatting to an older guy who said he liked my pictures and flirted with me for a while. Eventually he asked if I’d be interested in meeting up and I said maybe. He asked what I was into and then said he’d like to show me what he wanted to do to me and sent me some images.
The pictures were scans of a hand-drawn comic of sorts depicting young men being physically and sexually tortured, dismembered and murdered. I freaked the hell out, logged off and deleted my account and then spent days not sleeping thinking about the fact that some guy living nearby, who knew what I looked like, wanted to do that to me. Eventually I told myself that it was not likely the guy seriously thought he was going to find a willing partner for what was shown in the pictures, and more likely he was just trying to be an asshole and freak me out on purpose, but it still disturbed me for a long time.
I was 15, year is 1997, met an English guy in online chat (AIM) who was 19. Lied that I was 16. Chatted for months, def got sexual. I was going to England for the summer to stay with family. Told one Auntie I was going to visit another and vice versa and took a train to meet up with him and go to a 3 day festival in a field somewhere. Told no one my plan. Had fun at the festival, went to another with him a few weeks later and decided I hated him by the end of it. Missed the last train to an Auntie’s house late one night and had to call a cousin nearby to come pick me up. She blabbed and it all came crashing down and I was grounded for the rest of the summer after that.
Here’s the thing, I had no idea this was scary at the time! I thought it was a great idea! How fun to meet a foreign boy who already “loves” me!
Now I think back on it, I can NOT believe how stupid I was. I also can not believe how lucky I am that he turned out to actually be a slightly dorky 19 year old boy and not some old, gross, creepy, pedo rapist! I am so lucky that the worst that happened was I smoked some shitty weed in a damp field next to an overflowing port-a-loo.
I tell this story to all my friends with kids because my parents had literally no idea I was talking to guys online or that I was going to do this, and they had no way of stopping it from happening, which is terrifying.
I found out after my father died he had been using photos and information about my life to catfish young lesbian women online to get naked photos of them. I had to go through his fake facebook account he set up using all my real information and contact every single friend listed and explain what happened. Then they got mad at me I had them using the info he had given to find my business and turn up in my store mad at me for lying to them.
… I am kind of afraid to say much, but let’s say, a few years ago I had a profile somewhere, and the profile could be translated as ‘Lord God’ (it was a joke profile). I wasn’t using it often, but sometimes, I was receiving strange messages from some dude. He was obviously not okay. He was like … blah blah, today I did this or that, then ended it with some odd nonsense, and so on. I would say a troll, but I had some rough period, and didn’t visit the profile for over 8 months. That dude had been sending me messages almost every second day, sometimes even 2-3 daily. Some of them were oddly deep, or I would say quite elaborated and philosophical, and often very, very religious(of course).
I felt bad, since I was ignoring him… which was quite a religious experience itself… and I went through some messages (there were hundreds of them, and I checked a few, more curious whether this dude was okay mentally). He had some… well… let’s say ‘strange liking’ to his niece, he admitted it, asked for an advice, and so on. Keep in mind, at that time, that message was over 5 months old. He was hinting how she is often with him alone, and… yeah… He had never said anything specific. He was more or less conflicted about it. I checked his profile… he had pictures of some young girl there. Some later messages were quite odd, I would say ‘delusional’. I remember only that he was mentioning demons and such. I sent some screenshots and reported the profile. Then, I somewhat panicked and decided to delete my profile as fast as possible. Therefore I do not know whether I received the response or anything.
It was scary much, much later, considering how many messages (and emails on the address, which you received automatically with the profile )I ignored. I was thinking, maybe one of those messages or emails was talking about something much darker… that shit still haunts me.
Replied to someone who messaged me on a dating app. This app allowed messaging without a match. I basically responded with a generic friendly reply and he demanded my contact info. I said I don’t give that out for my safety, I communicate on here, and he FLIPPED. Started sending me screenshots of my social profiles (which were not listed on the app) as well as home address. Then messaged me on Facebook saying I was stupid to think I could prevent him from finding what he wanted to track me down, then a maps screenshot of my home..
At this point my sister googled the name he had stupidly provided me by messaging on Facebook, and he turned out to be a convicted rapist who had failed to report his new address. I called the cops and they somehow tracked him down and arrested him. All this because I just made the mistake of responding hello. It’s so great being a woman!
I am a University professor. I met someone off of here and we hit it off pretty quickly. She seemed a little too eager for the wrong reasons, so I tried to end things. I never gave her any of my personal information.
Scariest thing was when I worked in government and pulled a system that helps track people down (i worked in tax). They knew more about me then I knew about me. Girl I made out with back in 10th grade? Yep she was listed as knowing me.
Unfiltered internet access as a kid led a grown man I did not know coming to find me. I did not give him my address, but he showed up to the house next door and asked for me by my full fucking name. They did not redirect him to my house, but told my parents the next day and I got in big trouble. Glad I got in trouble instead of getting taken. I was like, 12 or 13.
Back when I was about 19 or 20–circa 2005– I saw a documentary on CNN about child trafficking. They were specifically in Romania, following the street kids caught up in the life of that. So one man an old butt man in his 50s came for “sex tourism” to get this 14 year old boy. And I noticed whomever he set it up with they used Yahoo messenger.
This was in the early, wild west days of chat rooms.
I was like bullshit, you can’t do just do that. So I hopped onto to my computer found what looked like the chat the man was in and said “I’m looking for a boy”
Literally FIFTY different windows opened up. What do you want? Age, country or origin? Blonde, brunetts, etc. SCARED THE RAVING HELL OUT OF ME. I completely uninstalled Yahoo Messenger and switched to AIM.
Spent about a month scared to death that the police were gonna kick my parents door in because my dumb ass was curious and looked into some shit I should have never and left it alone.
I never thought it was real, or that frighteningly easy to do something like that. I was and still am horrified. And I feel sorry for any and all kids caught up in this terrible terrible crime against them.
This was back in 2013, when Omegle was super big. I was a middle schooler with essentially no friends, and was going through puberty with super low self esteem. I was 12.
Met a guy online. He was “15.” He talked me into sending pictures of myself. I knew it was stupid as I was doing it, but for whatever dumb reason I fought the instinct that said it was a bad idea and sent it anyways. He immediately saved it and sent it back to me, told me he wanted a pic of down there as well, or he’d post it online.
I got scared and told him no. He posted the pic and my kik username online. I had dozens of messages in literally minutes, no one cared I was a child, no one wanted to help me take it down. Thank fuck it didn’t have my face in it. I told him he was a piece of shit, this was illegal, and I was deleting the account. He promised to find me again and ruin my life.
One month later I discovered the Amanda Todd story. If you don’t know that case, it’s heartbreaking, and it’s VERY similar to what happened to me. I spent the next 3 years in peak fear that my life was going to be ruined over it. I finally told someone what happened at 15, but I never did take it to the police. I was too ashamed of my parents finding out.
I was really young, probably 12 or so and met someone on neopets (maybe? I honestly can’t remember). Their screen name was something like soccergirl and we had innocent conversations usually very boring like “what r u doing today” etc etc. well we decided to video chat and turns out my ‘friend’ was actually an old man jacking off. It scared me so bad and I called one of those child predator hotlines
It wasn’t a situation that ever put me in any danger, but a few years back I was watching a streamer on Twitch and he got swatted. He was a cooking streamer, just chatting with us while he made tacos. Suddenly he was saying that he could see there were a ton of cop cars outside and he walked off camera with his hands up. Camera stayed on and we got to watch cops in tactical gear walk through his kitchen while clearing the house. Thankfully it ended as well as it could, his wife and kids weren’t home at the time and nobody was trigger-happy enough to shoot his dogs (or him). But it was definitely nerve wracking for a while, sitting there wondering if we were going to hear gunshots.
He told us later that according to the cops, someone had called in saying there was a hostage situation at his house. It was literally just him and his dogs and he was making tacos! Who the fuck swats someone who’s just showing people how to make tacos?
Lost all my data. All my self-made music, all photos of activities with friends and family of over 10 years. All my uni stuff, including my thesis.
I was too naive back then and watched a bunch of TV shows online (mostly because I wanted them in English, not the shoddy German dubs), and used various sites for that with way too little protection. Did this for years, and then one day, one of the damn ads they showed immediately hit me with WannaCry. I took ~5-10s to realize what happened and yank the cord, but it was too late.
I was fairly certain that I had burned some of that stuff on some CDs at one point, but wasn’t able to find anything.
One day, after I moved I finally took a weekend to sift through the hundreds of CDs I amassed through the years to finally clean them out. Most weren’t even in a case, just stacked raw and in a box. When I had yet another stack of ~30 in my hands, inspecting for labeling and looking on the underside if anything was written on it, there was this one completely unlabeled one, filled roughly 3/4. Something in me told me to slide it in to check, and I cried for probably half an hour. It was almost ALL my photos and music I’ve been missing for years! That was honestly one of the happiest days of my life. Found my uni stuff as well in that box.
I now have two NAS each with mirroring storage and the NASs mirroring each other, as well as a third copy on my PC, and a USB drive I should probably update soon.
Posting this on an alt because my main account has way too much on it.
A few years ago, I got addicted to sexting on Omegle, and eventually, I ended up on tags for some pretty dark kinks. One night, a man started our conversation by offering me money to kidnap a teenage girl. I was also a teenage girl – he asked before I could say that, and I thought it was best to not tell him and try to gather information instead. He did not seem like he had good intentions – I mean, no kidnapper really does, but it was clear he was perverted, not just trying to get a ransom or something. He disconnected before I could get very much out of him, but I did get a name, age, address, and pictures of the kid.
I was incredibly shaken, but the next day I started looking into the town, scouring local Facebook pages. (Schools in small towns often don’t have any hesitancy to mention the kids’ names on Facebook, so I figured I could look for her name to try to verify that any of this was real.) I didn’t find her name specifically, but after only an hour or so of looking around the area, it was clear that her family had had history there for ages, so it seemed like there was a good chance it was real. I didn’t have enough information to really do much. Telling someone who could help me and talking to the police properly meant admitting that I had been sexting, and on top of that, I was terrified that whoever the guy was, he could track me down if I did anything serious. (Blame trauma from years prior.) But I ended up installing an app to get a burner phone number, calling the police late the following night, and begging them to tell her parents what was going on. I can only hope she’s okay now. Occasionally I still google her name or her town, and I haven’t seen any missing child reports, so… At least there’s that.
I had a stalker back on aim. He’d pop up with harassment, get blocked, make new screen names to bother me with, get blocked more, give up for a while, and start over.
Something like a year later I was playing final fantasy 11, an mmo, when someone joined our guild. I didn’t really pay attention because I wasn’t super into leveling, mostly I dicked around and did the crafting, but this person always offered to help level. For no reason I simply didn’t care for this person, so I stayed away. This went on for literally an entire year before finally I needed help with some quest, and dude invited himself to help. Whatever. Fine.
Things were pretty normal until I picked up a couple weird things, they knew a little too much about me,were a little too interested in me, kept trying to get me to admit i didn’t hate them. I was like… well I don’t know you, so I guess not.
And they dropped the bomb. They were my stalker.
They spent a stupid amount of time going through my aim conversations finding clues about what my screen name and server i was on, and what my guild was. Made a character on that server. Leveled it up. Joined my guild. Made themselves indispensable to said guild. All to lure me in to eventually being in a party with them so they could finally get me to admit that I don’t hate them.
Their reasoning was that they had apologized for their past behavior so I was required to forgive them, and since I interacted with them without knowing who they were and didn’t immediately hate them, I must accept their apologies, forgive their behavior, and be their best friend.
I was not pleased. I wound up leaving that guild and eventually the game over it, especially when my ass guild took his side because “he did apologize” (and was higher level than I was).
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I once got an email sent from my own email that someone has my password, they even wrote the password in the email of the email, saying has access to all my contacts and social media and that has made a compilation of the porn i watched while masturbating and it’ll be send to everyone if i tell the police or anyone, he/she/they whoever wanted some chunk of BTC to be sent in a crypto wallet address, i panicked and later on I found out it’s some sort of a scam
I used to work online for a social media site.
We were popular enough in our prime that we attracted the attention of a hacking collective.
They held the site hostage for money, they wanted to be paid a “consulting fee” of several thousand dollars to go away and stop taking the site down, fucking with our users, and performing all sorts of hacks to scrape personal information. They insisted that other sites (IMVU was the example given) had paid their fee in order to be left alone.
One of them reached out to me and threatened me by revealing several pieces of my personal information and claiming they had much more, including my bank account information.
We couldn’t pay them, that’s the thing they didn’t realize, we literally didn’t have the amount they were asking for. The site was being poorly managed and was on its last legs.
I saw the site going under slowly and wanted out, I was under a lot of stress, I was being contacted by people who I assumed to be dangerous. My boss was up my ass about stuff, so I just walked away – best decision I ever made.
Back in the day I had a stalker that would follow me on different social media and would make new aim accounts whenever I blocked her. We never met in person except in passing. When I was in marching band she’d be in the stands and shout my name to try to get my attention. She kept stalking me until I was like 23.
Once got an email with a photo of a ghost that said if I didn’t forward it to 3 people I would die in 24 hours
Edit: Damn I just got flagged and warned from Reddit about making a joke that I was a ghost
I once was messing around in audacity and was singing and listening back and while I was I heard in tts “nice singing f*****” I have never yanked a ethernet cable out so fast. Completely wiped that pc.
I was ACTIVELY stalked by a guy on all imaginable social media when I was 18, at some point I even thought he would show up at my door and kill me.
He would make random people (girls too) message me and tell that he’s around my area and that I must meet up with him immediately if I don’t want any trouble. I had to delete all my socials and become a literal recluse to escape his ass
Getting doxxed over Minecraft
Getting stalked by an ex.
Omegle
When my online bank account got hacked. In just a seconds, everything was gone, my savings, my peace of mind, all wiped out before I could even react.
It’s not scary now but at the time it was. I was 9 maybe and was super into Animal Jam. This girl and I became friends through it, but then she found my YouTube channel and lowkey started internet stalking me (my username in both places was the same). Then one day I logged onto Animal Jam and she was acting all sad, said she was “quitting life,” and then logged out and never logged on again for the few years I continued playing
This was AOL instant messenger, around 1999 or 2000. I accepted a message request from someone whose screen name I didn’t recognize. I opened the message and the message read that In 10 seconds, my computer was going to get hijacked. Around 10 seconds later, the hard disk drive lit and was making all kinds of noise. I panicked, turned off and unplugged everything. I turned the computer back on later and everything seemed fine.
Some jerk sent me a d*ck pic and he had a poster on his wall for Halo 5. Everyone knows that’s the worst Halo!
I was scared for his lack of intelligence.
As a 12 year old I was talking to someone over 21 who as an adult I most definitely realized was a pedo. Glad I didn’t meet up or anything. The Internet is scary.
Someone tried to blackmail me. I told them go ahead, I have no modesty.
I used to be Admin of Minecraft server. Owner owned a HUGE ddosing site. It’s shutdown by FBI already. But when I left the server and resigned as an Admin. The owner got all my personal info and was mailing home threats to me. He also ddos’ed me offline for 3 months straight.
I didn’t believe this was about me until I was recently reminiscing about high school. He has threatened to call in a fake bomb threat to my high school. In that same time, our school shutdown due to a bomb threat. I have a feeling it was about me, but I never got in trouble about it or anything.. Nothing happened since.
I was a victim of sexploitation a couple of years ago. Sent a bunch of my nudes to a gc on Instagram of all my friends saying that I was sending pics to a minor. Most terrifying few hours of my life. I have not returned to Instagram since
When YouTube first came out my friend and I watched a video of 2 guys doing a drive by shooting. We were like holding each other crying. We watch someone die online.
I’m an admin of a local Facebook group. I deleted someone’s post and he went batshit crazy on me. Because it’s a local (small rural community) group there was a good chance he knew where I worked and possibly even where I lived. He threatened me and my daughter… all because I deleted his facebook post.
I called the police and they said they can’t do anything unless he actually does something. They said he probably wouldn’t and indeed he didn’t. I found others who know him and apparently he threatens people a lot but does nothing. I assume he’s a drinker
I had inadvertently left my zoom room open (and minimized) after checking some settings. Imagine my alarm when I heard my male coworker say “hey what’s up” when he arrived 5 minutes earlier for a zoom meeting… and I was pumping breast milk!
(Not the kind of scary you were talking about, I’m sure… but it sure freaked me out!)
Thankfully my camera angle was such that he didn’t see anything scarring. When he asked “is that a 3D printer I hear running?” I said No and changed the subject.
My husband’s ex-girlfriend managed to use my phone’s location services to stalk me when we first started dating.
She went to the 3 locations I posted most from – my house, my job as house coordinator for a neurodivergent young man with paranoid schizophrenia, and my mom’s house.
I get sick to this day thinking about how close she came to finding my client’s house – you had to know exactly which hidden road to turn – and what she would’ve done. His doctors speculated that if he went into catatonia, he would not ever be coming back. She could have literally scared him to death (which the state mental hospital would’ve been for him. And us! That’s our boy!).
I say this because she tried breaking into my mother’s house next and got my mom put on a psych hold bc my mom had just taken her Ambien when she heard her, and by the time the cops showed up my poor mom was out of her mind with fear, so they took her to the hospital. I had to beg them to release her to me.
And then finally, she came back, broke into my car, trashed it, and that’s what she needed to move on, I guess.
I absolutely do not play with location services. Turn that shit off.
ETA: how’d we know it was her? Dipshit left HER location services on, plus she was still on my husband’s plan when we met, so we pulled it up and yep, she hit all 3 :/
There’s a good chance she’s on Reddit so just in case: it’s still on sight, bitch.
Got sent the “anne.jpg” link at 2pm and I opened it. I had my headphones on at a high volume setting, my browser was full screen, and it was pitch black. It was the worst jumpscare of my life, and the only one that physically made me feel sick.
For those who don’t know what it is, it’s just the “jeff the killer” image flashing rapidly on full screen while blasting an extremely loud, constant scream sound effect. Not too bad if you expect it, but out of nowhere, coupled with the sound effect it scared the living shit out of me. The link itself doesn’t exist anymore but the picture has become infamous since.
Something more light-hearted: Someone tried to sextort me with garbage data aka they used the fake name, fake address, separate user, and separate pass I use for online accounts. Even better: they were using a compromised account of some poor SOB.
So, not scary. It was kind-of funny. “Yes I am Turd Ferguson. You know the difference between you and a mallard with a cold?”
I got doxxed on 4chan for posting a pic I took with metadata – nothing crazy, just something ghostly looking in the window reflection that I thought I’d share on the paranormal board. Someone posted my full name and address and my friend basically went through and commented on every thread til it fell off, but I never went back cause nooo thanks.
When I was 15, my friends and I went into the deep web and downloaded some PDFs and videos about Python programming, and another bullshit things that I can’t remember
The files were all empty
The next day, my friend (we were using his computer) said his entire workspace had been deleted
Three days later, he told us at school that everything on his computer came back
And on his desktop wallpaper, there was a message:
“We checked your whole computer. You seem like a nice guy, just trying to learn Python. Here’s the material. Be more careful when using the dark web”
And all the missing files were placed on his desktop
I did this to myself by accident when I was in high school. I made a shower video to my bf at the time and it showed EVERYTHING. I tried to send it to him, but the steam and condensation that was on my phone made me miss click and it sent to my public story. I don’t know if y’all ever had your phone with you in the shower, but the condensation makes it annoying to try and click on things without miss click. I didn’t know until my mom ran upstairs and yelled at me pretty bad. I looked at my phone and it blew up. Friends from school, KIDS from my dance class and family were texting me all worried. Random people saving it and screenshotting it. I obviously deleted it, but that didn’t stop the video going around part of my grade and now I’m afraid to bring my phone into the shower. Afraid to have my phone anywhere near the shower. I cringe while I shower thinking about that stupid moment.
On my neighborhood’s social media account, I posted a video of a person knocking at my door at 3am and acting strange. All I did was ask if they came to anybody else’s house and what they might have wanted, because I slept through the whole thing. Then this guy, who lives down the street and who I never met in my life, wrote all of these angry, hateful replies to my post, criticizing me with long lectures for not opening my door for the stranger despite my being asleep, stirring up a huge amount of hate toward me, telling other people in the replies he himself had a gun, and then he DMed me with his address and number and told me to come over and meet him in person. I told him to never contact me again and wrote nothing else. Then he found my work email and LinkedIn account and started sending me messages with his number and address, asking me to meet with him. I called my friend over because I was shaking in terror. He definitely knew where I lived based on the video. I thought about calling the police, but I ignored him and he stopped. I immediately deleted my social media account. All I did was post a video asking who the person at my door could have been. Never doing it again.
I was playing a game on xbox and there were a bunch of kids in the lobby being obnoxious as fuck and i said something to my wife on the couch next to me along the lines ‘heez the kids in this lobby are annoying as fuck’ and of them just started listing of my full name, address, my work address, license plate number and saying ‘i should be nicer if i knew what was good for me’ this all happened within like 15 seconds. I just turned off the xbox after that. My gamer tag was also linked to a burner email with no discernable information on the tag or email.
Out of the blue someone on steam messaged me, “hi [insert full real name].” And a story how he took his time to link a whole bunch of random information and match my interests (steam, reddit, other forums) to figure out who I was, where I was from, what I did. This took him weeks apparently. Why? Just to tell me how easy it was to track someone down.
I clicked the phishing email at work years ago…my heavens. What a nightmare that was.
Nothing happened. It was bait. Had to sit through a 60 minute video.
Back out ’97 I was on a wrestling board and posted that I was going to an ECW show near me. This guy kept replying with a million questions on the venue, the show, the talent – anything. I tried to keep up and he said something like “You convinced me to go. I’ll bring my kids.” I’m like “good for you” and didn’t give it much thought.
The day of the event hits and I’m walking up with my group, The ECW crowd isn’t exactly family friendly and there’s a big line to get in for the GA seats. It was fine and we’re all just happy to be there when I hear this voice calling my name. I look up and it’s the guy at the front of the line making a “come up” motion.
Years ago on a different reddit account I posted in a sub asking about a copy of a book I was looking to buy and I had someone reply to me with my full first and last name and email address with the caption “this you?” I still have no idea how they found that info based on what was on my account or why they did it. The mods deleted the comment pretty fast, but it was extremely unnerving.
I stole my mom’s credit card info to be able to access a Cam-girl website when I was like 13 or 14 years old. I got into a private room with one of them and racked up about $25 worth of charges pretty quickly. Needless to say, when I had “the mental clarity” to realize how fucking stupid I had just been, I logged out of the website and proceeded to shit a metaphorical brick.
I put my mom’s credit card back and stayed quiet about it until a few weeks later, she asked me about it when going over her bill. Fortunately, it wasn’t a “Girls Girls Girls!” named website, it sounded more technical, so I told her I accidentally bought something on World of Warcraft (she let me use her credit card for that and I did chores to pay for my subscription), and I gave her $25 cash from birthday money, and claimed I forgot to tell her the day I did it because she wasn’t home at the time.
That cam-girl showed me things I had never seen before…
Back in the 2010’s, when me and a friend at the time who cosplayed were trolling Omegle during a sleepover for laughs, someone there almost correctly guessed the city I lived in with some kinda tool he was using. He was technically still wrong, but it was only like aprovince or two of my country over. like, I COULD’VE GONE TO THAT CITY HE GUESSED BY TRAIN.
Like, back then, doxing was not as popular yet, and we hadn’t told him anything identifying during the chat at all. Nor had we posted anything remotely identifying on social media on that one. So it was TERRFYING. 😬
When I was maybe 15, I was on a kid’s website and was talking to a lot of people and making online friends for the first time. There was this one person with a girl’s name who had a bunch of bad furry art on their profile and tried to talk to me a lot. I was a bit weirded out by them, but I didn’t want to be mean so I chatted with them occasionally. Thankfully, since it was on a kid’s website, every conversation was public, and someone reached out to tell me that apparently this person was a pedo. They didn’t offer proof, but I had a strong gut feeling that they were telling the truth, so I told the person I knew what they were and to stop talking to me. They basically disappeared from the site after that. It’s not that scary now, but at 15 I was really freaked out and didn’t talk to people I didn’t already know on that site for a while. Looking back, I’m realizing that that person in no way talked like a teenage girl. I’m glad the person didn’t manage to get me off the kid’s site and start DMing me creepy shit because that would have been super traumatic
Someone posted in my state’s subreddit about purchasing a gun/guns. The exact details of the post are kinda blurry now because this happened when my first son was really little so it was at least 2 years ago and I was also constantly sleep deprived. But suffice to say, something was OFF about the post and the person’s responses to the post. I called them out, told everyone on the sub that I thought the person was up to no good, and contacted moderators. Mods confirmed that the person was having some shady interactions elsewhere on reddit. At this point the OP starts DMing me getting increasingly irate and aggressive until I finally block them.
Didn’t think too much about it until this story started unfolding and I had a weird feeling about it. I did some research and now have reason to believe that it was this person who moved to my state to secure guns for her cult.
Back in the early 00’s I was running windows XP and zone alarm security suite which was a firewall/traffic monitor. I had an external HDD with everything on it. Music, personal information, banking stuff, home pictures and video…. It was my catch all.
Anyways, one day I’m chilling there and I notice my out traffic spike through the roof. I wasn’t doing anything to trigger that and I panicked. Started digging in and couldn’t find which program was causing it. Disabled my Ethernet port and it instantly stopped. Plugged it back in and within a minute it came back. Unplugged my external drive and it stopped again. Took my computer offline for several hours while I dug in. I had a Trojan backdoor virus which was dumping all of my data from my E:. I don’t know what or how much they got before I interrupted it but I reformatted and put up additional safe guards after that. Thank God I had ZA installed or I would have never even known.
I would like to add that I had a very reputable Anti-Virus installed with updated definitions, not Mcafee or Norton. As well as Spybot S&D. Don’t know when or how I got infected with the TH.
I commented on a cars thread and said something was mid trim level and the guy went off on me. Saying how I could never afford an $110k car and how I should stay in the kitchen where I belonged. He took it a step forward a couple hours later and said that I shouldn’t be talking about cars and things I didn’t know about and how I should be watching my two children (he named their names). He then messaged me a street view of my house.
Went to the cops, started a case, got a restraining order against him.
I used to go on chat rooms in the early 00s I was very young like 11-12 and I used to talk to people a lot. This one guy was really odd and I can’t remember what I did but I pissed him off so he somehow hacked my hotmail account and found out my postcode and address and everything and kept posting it in the chat room. Nothing else happened and eventually MSN chat rooms got closed down
Probably Facebook market place. I was selling a computer on Facebook marketplace place and I scheduled a meetup with someone to sell the computer. The meet up happened at 8pm and when I went to the meetup location, it was in the back of a truck depot that looked a little empty. I got sketchy vibes but im thinking nothing bad is going to happen. I stayed in my car and messaged the guy that I was here to sell the computer. He said ok give me 5 minutes. I hopped out of my car and started walking around and I saw this dirty white van (like it had a mud white color to it). I was facing the front of the van and the engine turned on and my instinct kicked in to get out of there immediately. So I started walking back to my car, and this van was following me. Hopped in my car and drove off and the van followed me for about 6 or 7 miles before I lost it on the freeway. I went back to Facebook messenger and the guy had blocked me or deleted his profile. I started to conceal carry from that point going forward after that experience.
When I was about 20 or 21 I started to come to terms with my sexuality and decided to try out a gay dating/hookup website (early days of online dating – I’m old). It was location based so all the people I was chatting with were in my home area. I had a few conversations that didn’t really go anywhere, then got chatting to an older guy who said he liked my pictures and flirted with me for a while. Eventually he asked if I’d be interested in meeting up and I said maybe. He asked what I was into and then said he’d like to show me what he wanted to do to me and sent me some images.
The pictures were scans of a hand-drawn comic of sorts depicting young men being physically and sexually tortured, dismembered and murdered. I freaked the hell out, logged off and deleted my account and then spent days not sleeping thinking about the fact that some guy living nearby, who knew what I looked like, wanted to do that to me. Eventually I told myself that it was not likely the guy seriously thought he was going to find a willing partner for what was shown in the pictures, and more likely he was just trying to be an asshole and freak me out on purpose, but it still disturbed me for a long time.
I was 15, year is 1997, met an English guy in online chat (AIM) who was 19. Lied that I was 16. Chatted for months, def got sexual. I was going to England for the summer to stay with family. Told one Auntie I was going to visit another and vice versa and took a train to meet up with him and go to a 3 day festival in a field somewhere. Told no one my plan. Had fun at the festival, went to another with him a few weeks later and decided I hated him by the end of it. Missed the last train to an Auntie’s house late one night and had to call a cousin nearby to come pick me up. She blabbed and it all came crashing down and I was grounded for the rest of the summer after that.
Here’s the thing, I had no idea this was scary at the time! I thought it was a great idea! How fun to meet a foreign boy who already “loves” me!
Now I think back on it, I can NOT believe how stupid I was. I also can not believe how lucky I am that he turned out to actually be a slightly dorky 19 year old boy and not some old, gross, creepy, pedo rapist! I am so lucky that the worst that happened was I smoked some shitty weed in a damp field next to an overflowing port-a-loo.
I tell this story to all my friends with kids because my parents had literally no idea I was talking to guys online or that I was going to do this, and they had no way of stopping it from happening, which is terrifying.
I found out after my father died he had been using photos and information about my life to catfish young lesbian women online to get naked photos of them. I had to go through his fake facebook account he set up using all my real information and contact every single friend listed and explain what happened. Then they got mad at me I had them using the info he had given to find my business and turn up in my store mad at me for lying to them.
… I am kind of afraid to say much, but let’s say, a few years ago I had a profile somewhere, and the profile could be translated as ‘Lord God’ (it was a joke profile). I wasn’t using it often, but sometimes, I was receiving strange messages from some dude. He was obviously not okay. He was like … blah blah, today I did this or that, then ended it with some odd nonsense, and so on. I would say a troll, but I had some rough period, and didn’t visit the profile for over 8 months. That dude had been sending me messages almost every second day, sometimes even 2-3 daily. Some of them were oddly deep, or I would say quite elaborated and philosophical, and often very, very religious(of course).
I felt bad, since I was ignoring him… which was quite a religious experience itself… and I went through some messages (there were hundreds of them, and I checked a few, more curious whether this dude was okay mentally). He had some… well… let’s say ‘strange liking’ to his niece, he admitted it, asked for an advice, and so on. Keep in mind, at that time, that message was over 5 months old. He was hinting how she is often with him alone, and… yeah… He had never said anything specific. He was more or less conflicted about it. I checked his profile… he had pictures of some young girl there. Some later messages were quite odd, I would say ‘delusional’. I remember only that he was mentioning demons and such. I sent some screenshots and reported the profile. Then, I somewhat panicked and decided to delete my profile as fast as possible. Therefore I do not know whether I received the response or anything.
It was scary much, much later, considering how many messages (and emails on the address, which you received automatically with the profile )I ignored. I was thinking, maybe one of those messages or emails was talking about something much darker… that shit still haunts me.
Replied to someone who messaged me on a dating app. This app allowed messaging without a match. I basically responded with a generic friendly reply and he demanded my contact info. I said I don’t give that out for my safety, I communicate on here, and he FLIPPED. Started sending me screenshots of my social profiles (which were not listed on the app) as well as home address. Then messaged me on Facebook saying I was stupid to think I could prevent him from finding what he wanted to track me down, then a maps screenshot of my home..
At this point my sister googled the name he had stupidly provided me by messaging on Facebook, and he turned out to be a convicted rapist who had failed to report his new address. I called the cops and they somehow tracked him down and arrested him. All this because I just made the mistake of responding hello. It’s so great being a woman!
I am a University professor. I met someone off of here and we hit it off pretty quickly. She seemed a little too eager for the wrong reasons, so I tried to end things. I never gave her any of my personal information.
She showed up at my lecture.
Scariest thing was when I worked in government and pulled a system that helps track people down (i worked in tax). They knew more about me then I knew about me. Girl I made out with back in 10th grade? Yep she was listed as knowing me.
Unfiltered internet access as a kid led a grown man I did not know coming to find me. I did not give him my address, but he showed up to the house next door and asked for me by my full fucking name. They did not redirect him to my house, but told my parents the next day and I got in big trouble. Glad I got in trouble instead of getting taken. I was like, 12 or 13.
Back when I was about 19 or 20–circa 2005– I saw a documentary on CNN about child trafficking. They were specifically in Romania, following the street kids caught up in the life of that. So one man an old butt man in his 50s came for “sex tourism” to get this 14 year old boy. And I noticed whomever he set it up with they used Yahoo messenger.
This was in the early, wild west days of chat rooms.
I was like bullshit, you can’t do just do that. So I hopped onto to my computer found what looked like the chat the man was in and said “I’m looking for a boy”
Literally FIFTY different windows opened up. What do you want? Age, country or origin? Blonde, brunetts, etc. SCARED THE RAVING HELL OUT OF ME. I completely uninstalled Yahoo Messenger and switched to AIM.
Spent about a month scared to death that the police were gonna kick my parents door in because my dumb ass was curious and looked into some shit I should have never and left it alone.
I never thought it was real, or that frighteningly easy to do something like that. I was and still am horrified. And I feel sorry for any and all kids caught up in this terrible terrible crime against them.
It was over 20 years ago, but it still haunts me.
When I was a kid I was changing and my webcam light was on, didn’t notice until a window popped up saying “I see you”.
Sounds like a lie but it happened and was freaky. Never leave cams plugged in anymore or torrent/download sketchy shit.
This was back in 2013, when Omegle was super big. I was a middle schooler with essentially no friends, and was going through puberty with super low self esteem. I was 12.
Met a guy online. He was “15.” He talked me into sending pictures of myself. I knew it was stupid as I was doing it, but for whatever dumb reason I fought the instinct that said it was a bad idea and sent it anyways. He immediately saved it and sent it back to me, told me he wanted a pic of down there as well, or he’d post it online.
I got scared and told him no. He posted the pic and my kik username online. I had dozens of messages in literally minutes, no one cared I was a child, no one wanted to help me take it down. Thank fuck it didn’t have my face in it. I told him he was a piece of shit, this was illegal, and I was deleting the account. He promised to find me again and ruin my life.
One month later I discovered the Amanda Todd story. If you don’t know that case, it’s heartbreaking, and it’s VERY similar to what happened to me. I spent the next 3 years in peak fear that my life was going to be ruined over it. I finally told someone what happened at 15, but I never did take it to the police. I was too ashamed of my parents finding out.
I hope that sick fuck out there got caught.
Seeing my father who disappeared years prior on Omegle, while I was at a sleepover when I was a teen.
I was really young, probably 12 or so and met someone on neopets (maybe? I honestly can’t remember). Their screen name was something like soccergirl and we had innocent conversations usually very boring like “what r u doing today” etc etc. well we decided to video chat and turns out my ‘friend’ was actually an old man jacking off. It scared me so bad and I called one of those child predator hotlines
It wasn’t a situation that ever put me in any danger, but a few years back I was watching a streamer on Twitch and he got swatted. He was a cooking streamer, just chatting with us while he made tacos. Suddenly he was saying that he could see there were a ton of cop cars outside and he walked off camera with his hands up. Camera stayed on and we got to watch cops in tactical gear walk through his kitchen while clearing the house. Thankfully it ended as well as it could, his wife and kids weren’t home at the time and nobody was trigger-happy enough to shoot his dogs (or him). But it was definitely nerve wracking for a while, sitting there wondering if we were going to hear gunshots.
He told us later that according to the cops, someone had called in saying there was a hostage situation at his house. It was literally just him and his dogs and he was making tacos! Who the fuck swats someone who’s just showing people how to make tacos?
WannaCry.
Lost all my data. All my self-made music, all photos of activities with friends and family of over 10 years. All my uni stuff, including my thesis.
I was too naive back then and watched a bunch of TV shows online (mostly because I wanted them in English, not the shoddy German dubs), and used various sites for that with way too little protection. Did this for years, and then one day, one of the damn ads they showed immediately hit me with WannaCry. I took ~5-10s to realize what happened and yank the cord, but it was too late.
I was fairly certain that I had burned some of that stuff on some CDs at one point, but wasn’t able to find anything.
One day, after I moved I finally took a weekend to sift through the hundreds of CDs I amassed through the years to finally clean them out. Most weren’t even in a case, just stacked raw and in a box. When I had yet another stack of ~30 in my hands, inspecting for labeling and looking on the underside if anything was written on it, there was this one completely unlabeled one, filled roughly 3/4. Something in me told me to slide it in to check, and I cried for probably half an hour. It was almost ALL my photos and music I’ve been missing for years! That was honestly one of the happiest days of my life. Found my uni stuff as well in that box.
I now have two NAS each with mirroring storage and the NASs mirroring each other, as well as a third copy on my PC, and a USB drive I should probably update soon.
Make backups, people!
Posting this on an alt because my main account has way too much on it.
A few years ago, I got addicted to sexting on Omegle, and eventually, I ended up on tags for some pretty dark kinks. One night, a man started our conversation by offering me money to kidnap a teenage girl. I was also a teenage girl – he asked before I could say that, and I thought it was best to not tell him and try to gather information instead. He did not seem like he had good intentions – I mean, no kidnapper really does, but it was clear he was perverted, not just trying to get a ransom or something. He disconnected before I could get very much out of him, but I did get a name, age, address, and pictures of the kid.
I was incredibly shaken, but the next day I started looking into the town, scouring local Facebook pages. (Schools in small towns often don’t have any hesitancy to mention the kids’ names on Facebook, so I figured I could look for her name to try to verify that any of this was real.) I didn’t find her name specifically, but after only an hour or so of looking around the area, it was clear that her family had had history there for ages, so it seemed like there was a good chance it was real. I didn’t have enough information to really do much. Telling someone who could help me and talking to the police properly meant admitting that I had been sexting, and on top of that, I was terrified that whoever the guy was, he could track me down if I did anything serious. (Blame trauma from years prior.) But I ended up installing an app to get a burner phone number, calling the police late the following night, and begging them to tell her parents what was going on. I can only hope she’s okay now. Occasionally I still google her name or her town, and I haven’t seen any missing child reports, so… At least there’s that.
I had a stalker back on aim. He’d pop up with harassment, get blocked, make new screen names to bother me with, get blocked more, give up for a while, and start over.
Something like a year later I was playing final fantasy 11, an mmo, when someone joined our guild. I didn’t really pay attention because I wasn’t super into leveling, mostly I dicked around and did the crafting, but this person always offered to help level. For no reason I simply didn’t care for this person, so I stayed away. This went on for literally an entire year before finally I needed help with some quest, and dude invited himself to help. Whatever. Fine.
Things were pretty normal until I picked up a couple weird things, they knew a little too much about me,were a little too interested in me, kept trying to get me to admit i didn’t hate them. I was like… well I don’t know you, so I guess not.
And they dropped the bomb. They were my stalker.
They spent a stupid amount of time going through my aim conversations finding clues about what my screen name and server i was on, and what my guild was. Made a character on that server. Leveled it up. Joined my guild. Made themselves indispensable to said guild. All to lure me in to eventually being in a party with them so they could finally get me to admit that I don’t hate them.
Their reasoning was that they had apologized for their past behavior so I was required to forgive them, and since I interacted with them without knowing who they were and didn’t immediately hate them, I must accept their apologies, forgive their behavior, and be their best friend.
I was not pleased. I wound up leaving that guild and eventually the game over it, especially when my ass guild took his side because “he did apologize” (and was higher level than I was).
I was chatting with a woman online and things had been getting pretty risque.
One day I logged in at our usual time and she was already online.
We started chatting about stuff and suddenly she was just going for the sex talk. It seemed really odd.
It was right at that moment I realized that I wasn’t chatting with her, but her fifteen year old daughter.
I immediately logged off and sent her an email.
Yeah, she was still at work and hadn’t had time to let me know.
I told her what happened, which was really nothing, but it could have been very wrong.