The internet is the greatest forum of free speech that has ever existed in the history of humanity. It’s also a place where you can creep out with little chance of being identified.

This piece is based on an AskReddit thread. Link on the last page.

---

1. Heartbreak hotel.

Used to play habbo hotel a lot. Made some really good friends on there but one freaked me out.

He lived about 300 miles from me in northern England. He cheated on his girlfriend and messaged a girl I liked for ‘female approval of his manliness’. He also talked about coming down to my town and asked how I’d react if I saw him and her together.

Blocked him straight away and never spoke to him again. He was weird and thankfully he’s gone out of my life.

Myoplasmic

2. My ex-extortionist.

I sent very degrading nudes of myself to a “woman” who turned out to be a very creepy man.

He threatened to send them to all of my friends and colleagues if I didnt pay up. The moment that happened, my heart dropped. But then I thought screw it – my sexuality is none of their business” and told the guy to go get a job. He never sent anything.

igatrinit

3. I bet you won a free cruise too…

I was browsing porn for the first time as a teenager and a “WARNING: THIS IS THE [Insert town I live in] POLICE. CALL THIS NUMBER NOW” tab opened. I was scared to death until I realized “If I was in trouble from the police, why would they force open a tab in my browser?”

WafflezTheGreat

4. Offline.

I used to play online games with a guy who was American, but lived in Japan. Then that tsunami hit, and none of us ever heard from him again.

anooblo

5. All about that race.

I went online on the game Burnout Paradise. Wasn’t sure how it worked because I saw no one else, so I minimized the game and forgot about it. A little bit later I completely forgot about the minimized game, and heard a voice.

I listened closer and it sounded like two guys. I immediately thought someone was hacking me. My mic was plugged in so I said “what are you doing??” the guy goes “just looking at your records dude.” I thought like personal bank records etc. He meant my racing records in the game.

I told him to stop and he says something like “why dude you were open?” so I panicked and shut my computer down. Took a few minutes for me to actually make the connection.

Cojobe

6. “Seven days.”

Does over the phone count (from the Dial-up days)?

I once was talking with my sister in the kitchen when the phone rang. Caller ID said unknown number.

I picked it up, and all I heard was a recording of our voices, saying something we had said just a minute earlier in our conversation. After about 15 seconds of it, I suddenly heard this loud static-y screeching noise and then the call cut out.

[deleted]

7. You’ve got (junk) mail.

I was in high school, and I had swollen lymph nodes around my nether regions. I took pictures from all kinds of angles so I could show the doctor after school without having to expose myself in person.

Fast forward to computer class, and I’m logging into my google account to pull up my power point on the projector. As I’m trying to log into Drive, to my terror, I see 5 thumbnails of my junk displayed in the queue for auto-upload to Google+.

Luckily, no one noticed. I was always the weirdo outcast kid, so if the other students caught wind that this happened, my life would have been over promptly.

cyntrix

8. You threat your life.

This was like 2010, and I was gaming online. I was arguing with a dude who was raging and threatening me. There was brief pause in the conversation and I thought it was over. Then he came back and said, “Hello [real name], you still think I can’t find you?”

“You think you can hide from me?” I told him I wasn’t hiding and he should walk through my front door because I left it unlocked for him.

To this day I have no idea how he found out my real name.

TheLogicalFox

9. Caught in a web.

There were multiple posts of me on some shady site asking people in my area if anyone had nudes of me and someone wrote a detailed fantasy of having sex with me. The part that freaked me out is that they had taken pictures of my face off of social media. I deleted a massive amount of stuff online after that.

JupiterRat

10. You can pay bail by giving me your credit card number.

I got a popup once that informed me I had underage pornography on my computer (which I did not) and the police were on their way to my house. It instructed me to call a 1-800 number. When I read the first line of “you have child pornography on your computer” my heart stopped beating and I froze. But then I was like “how would calling a 1-800 number help me?” It was then I realized it was a scam. Still pretty terrifying.

thanatos891

11. Shoot the Messenger.

Back in the good ol’ MSN days when I was 11 and new to the internet and just added any old random on Messenger to chat to.

Ended up talking to this girl who was ostensibly from a few towns over.

Got to the point where ‘she’ demanded that I travelled down to where she was because I was now her boyfriend. Sent her one picture of me and never received one back from her. Obviously, being naive and young at the time, I just stopped talking to her somewhere along the line and didn’t think anything of it. But thinking back now, I’m pretty sure that was a sex offender.

matherto

12. Watching them watch.

A stranger emailed me a video of myself that was taken at the mall (that I didn’t know was being taken, when I was 15). I never figured out who it was or why.

[deleted]

13. What are the odds?

Out of curiosity, on one of my typical Internet rabbit hole days, I was reading stories about depression and suicide prevention and looked at a bunch of websites on the topic. That was when something incredibly coincidental happened.

All of the sudden my best friend from 15 years ago, who I hadn’t spoken to in a while, texts me and says “don’t do it man.” When I call him up, says it was completely random.

Anonymous

14. That’s why you don’t give your number out.

I met somebody on a game when I was a teen. He was older than I was, maybe late 20s, and he lived one state away from me. I gave my phone number out to anybody back then, I liked texting people. I was texting this guy, when he started demanding that I send him naked pictures of myself, which I wasn’t comfortable with.

I stopped texting him because those type of people irritate me. He messaged me with my full address one day, and asked me if it was familiar. He told me he was going to hunt me down if I didn’t send him the pictures he wanted. I kept asking him how he got my address, as he only knew my first name.

Turned out since we both had the same type of phone, he could track my location via a (non-nude) picture I had sent him. I changed my number and haven’t given my number out on the internet since.

cosmoandpeach

15. Slip through the cracks.

This guy I very briefly dated won’t leave me alone. I’ve blocked him on everything, but he keeps finding cracks to slip through.

Long story short, he played weird games and I wasn’t into it. I told him that I didn’t want to talk to him, and to not contact me anymore. He said he wouldn’t, then continued to bombard me with spam-like messages about everything from what he was watching on TV to the weather. I blocked him on my phone.

Months after doing this, I found a voicemail from him in my “blocked messages” folder. It was new. He tried friending me on Facebook. I blocked him. He posted a missed connection on Craigslist with my first name and city saying he missed me. He super liked me on Tinder.

I just wonder what crack he’ll slip through next, or if he’ll try to show up at my home or work.

dreamsinred

16. Mad, bad, or dad?

This was back when dial-up was still a thing. When I was 13, I had received a phone call. I picked up and it sounded like my dad, and the man said nothing otherwise. Both my mom and I had full on conversations with this guy for a week straight.

He said he’s very close to being home, and that we should leave the door unlocked. So we did, and my dad had come back from his trip. My mom had started asking about something he said, and he didn’t know what she was talking about. Dad claimed he never spoke to us the whole week as he didn’t have reception in the woods.

We called the phone company and were told that the lines may have been crossed. Meaning that whomever we were speaking to, lived on the same street. I think something went wrong because of our crappy dial-up, but why the guy pretended to by my dad… that I don’t know.

TheFactionless

17. Say that you love me.

As a girl, the creepiest stuff is some of the messages I’ve received from men online on various websites.

Guys so desperate for sex, they offer to pay me for it. Sending message after message asking to meet up even when I don’t reply. Sending penis pics. Being told all the stuff they want to do to me.

witherwithout

18. You can’t even disappear in peace these days.

A couple of years ago I disappeared for a while. There were pictures of me on online news. (Im fine now, I had a mental health issue at that time.) They used my Facebook profile picture on the news. I started getting lots of creepy hey babe message and genital pics on Facebook from strange old men. I changed my pic and they stopped: these guys were reverse-searching my pic from the news. Gross.

Incantanto

19. Fighting fire with fire?

This is a lesson on why you should be careful about what you say and do online. So if you haven’t heard of a website called YouNow its a place where you livestream and people watch. I don’t really get the point of it but it’s fun and easy to troll.

One day I stumble across a teenage girl. She was crying and saying how someone she thought was a friend was spreading lies on YouNow.

I go find the other girl and she is saying nasty stuff, like “I hate her. I was only her friend so I could ruin her life easier.” So I decided to step in.

The mean girls username was her first and last name. She was also wearing a sweatshirt with her high school’s name on it. After a short Google search I found her Facebook and email accounts. I sent her an email telling her to be nicer.

I then dug around and found out all sorts of random details: her number on the soft ball team, her dance clubs name, and her parents names and phone numbers.

I then screen apped some mean stuff she had snap chatted the first girl (she showed her phone screen to the camera). I started telling her in the chat to stop bullying or I’d text her mom what she had been saying. She called my bluff and I sent her an email with all the information I had. Then in the YouNow chat I told her to check her emails, which she did. She tried to apologize, but it was pretty halfhearted.

I ended up texting the mom the screen shots and then promptly blocked her number. I never found out the end of it but I hope the bullying stopped.

I think I did the right thing, but it was scary to me how easy it was to find all that information.

swanymcswan

20. Now that was a close call.

This one’s different. I was some guy’s scariest moment.

I was on a sex role-playing forum, wherein people pretend to be fictional characters and write out sex scenes. Blah, blah, blahbasically text-based cyber sex.

I found one guy who had a lot of the same turn-ons as I did, so we decided to give role-play a shot.

About two minutes in, I realized something was VERY off about the guy I was roleplaying with. His choice of words, his sentence structure, the types of typos he made even his choice of plot. It all made me very sure that this guy had to be young. (Thank god our discussion had been relatively mild, and hadn’t gotten to the cyber sex yet!) The site I was on required its users to be 18+, but I was convinced that this guy was younger nonetheless.

I excused myself, and googled the guy’s username. Within about 30 seconds, I found his twitter, his real name, and then his Facebook. The guy was like 14.

So, I PMed the guy back and told him every single thing I found out about him, in a hope to scare him into being more careful online.

I also reported his username to the mods.

CavalierTunes

21. Audience to the macabre.

I cant remember the year but you can find it if you look on the internet. I was on 4chan when this guy started posting pics of a dead girl. He said he killed her by strangulation i think. I thought he was just an edgy kid with too much time on his hand that like gore and snuff. Next day, it was all over 4chan. The guy had killed his ex and left her naked in her appt. Her kid found his mom like that when he got home after school i think. Disgusting stuff.

WillFerellsuckball69

22. You can tell because of the pixels.

This was many years ago and was the first fucked up thing I saw on the Internet. It was a Chinese guy dismembering and preparing a baby cooking it and eating it like chicken. Found out much later it was Photoshoped.

stanfan114

23. Incredibly human robot.

This might not be the ‘creepiest’, but it’s weird. When I was in high school, I had this friend from school who I spoke to a lot on MSN and there was one time this ‘bot’ added me, in which ‘it’ claimed it was a ‘counselling bot’ of some sort and at that age, I was terribly naive and believed almost anything… so, I would speak to this ‘bot’ about my problems… turns out it was this friend all along, who would tell everyone else at school about my problems. Not only did she do this, but she also made up a ‘pen pal’ who she claimed she spoke to and gave me their email address, when that was also herself. It was her mum who would call me a loner, weird and a bad influence as well.

chickeneggcheese

24. Muwha-ha-ha

I got a real nasty virus on my computer almost a decade ago. I left the computer scanning to see if I got rid of it and lied down to go to sleep.

I’m just falling asleep when I’m snapped out of it to hear an evil laugh soun effect coming from my computer.

TeethOrBullets

25. From out of the shadows.

My friend and I used to troll around omegle all the time. One night we got matched up with two random dudes in a dark room and one of them looks into the camera and says “Hey is that girl’s name Sarah?” We quickly realized we’d been matched with her abusive ex boyfriend. Out of all the people. She’d spent years trying to get away from this guy and was a little shaken up. We quickly exited omegle and haven’t been on since.

data_dawg

26. LFM

27. Mickey-mouse club.

I will never forget the night I was at a school meeting and got a call from my then 11 year old daughter. She was begging me to let her go with her friend “to meet a Disney star”…some actor from one of the shows they loved. She was rambling and excited and I couldn’t quite piece together what was happening. Told her we’d talk about it when I got home. I’m thinking there’s some meet and greet or event she wanted to go to.

Oh no. Her friend (who, at 11 already had Instagram) believed she was communicating with this actor. He had sent her pictures of “himself” and wanted her to meet up with him at the park down the street from her house. She had given him some personal info about her and where she lived and he knew the name of the park he wanted to meet her at. These girls fell for it hook, line and sinker.

I had her get her friend to send her screenshots of the pictures and conversation. We googled the actors name and the first 3 pictures that came up online are the pics this person sent her. It was disturbing. She began to see that this was a really dangerous situation.

I called the girls mom to let her know what was going on and then forwarded the screenshots to a friend that works at the prosecutors office. This is why she is not allowed to have social media yet, even 2 years later. They’re just too young to spot danger. I know I’m the lamest 7th grade mom these days because I won’t let her have Instagram or snapchat (when 95% of them do) but I don’t even care. It’s my job to keep her safe.

MexicanCousin1977

28. Perfect reverse troll.

Had a time I was in the bathroom “helping myself” and got a weird video call on Facebook, intrigued I opened it only to find a video of myself “helping myself” the person said they would forward it to all my friends on Facebook and I saw their face, they told me I had 10 minutes, so I grabbed a nearby pill bottle and acted like I took 20 pills. Then proceeded to collapse, they ended the video call and blocked me, they never posted anything. Still gives me the goosebumps to this day.

Coco656

29. Do you want to date my avatar?

I had a comunicator that I am using to usually talk with my few friends, on it I have only my name, date of birth and an avatar of a magpie.

On the first of January this year random girl just began talking with me, after a while she began asking me more personal information, where I am studying, what I like, who are my friends, what I like, apparently having only my name, avatar and date of birth she found my Facebook profile.

She began telling me how once someone was harrasing her all the time so now she finds people and shows them how easy it is to find stuff about someone.

I’ve never heard from her again.

Fyiirc

30. A note-able hacker.

I opened my computer the one day to find that a bunch of setting had been changed. My wallpaper was upside down, my icons shuffled around, my mouse settings were different. It was obvious I had been hacked. Then I realized there was a text file on my desktop. I opened it, and it said how this person had managed to hack me, along with some tips to improve my security. I wasn’t even mad, though I was a little unnerved.

BaconBaron42

31. Git-gud you salty scrub.

Some dude made a FaceBook account named after me (“MyName IsAnIdiot), started messaging me, harassing me, calling me “Jew-Boy” (strange because I’m not Jewish). Turns out he was some guy I whooped in League of Legends, found me because my user name is also my real name. Moral of the story, don’t play Teemo.

SpiffShientz

(Source)