The internet has come a long way since it went public in 1993. From being a shiny new invention that provided a small portal to the rest of the world, it has now become a ubiquitous and robust piece of technology that anyone can access. 

While its evolution may have upgraded life as we know it in many ways, the internet also has its dark side. And as these people on Reddit have revealed in a recent thread, it can lead to a scary encounter that may leave a lasting, unpleasant memory. 

These anecdotes range from holding a company website hostage to stalking incidents in real life. If you’ve experienced anything similar, feel free to share it in the comment boxes below. 

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#1

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 r**ist 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!

© Photo: Shanubis

#2

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.

© Photo: kkleigh90

#3

When I was 15, my friends and I went into the deep web and downloaded some PDFs and videos about Python programming, and another b******t 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

© Photo: Libertadores_

#4

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.

© Photo: urasianbella

#5

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 f*****g 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.

© Photo: peachysdollies

#6

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 [darn] swats someone who’s just showing people how to make tacos?

© Photo: Lachwen

#7

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 k**l 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 a*s.

© Photo: User

#8

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.

© Photo: SemiHemiDemiDumb

#9

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.

© Photo: ay1mao

#10

In my time I was talking to a stranger on Facebook and one time I opened up too much to a person and he started harassing me so that I would send him a PHOTO of n****y or I would tell my family that I was gay, at that time it was my biggest fear, but one day my mom read the conversation because I fell asleep with my cell phone on in the living room and the messages were coming, she woke me up and we talked and it turns out that the harasser was a neighbor of ours. I came out of the closet and no one did anything to me, my fear was only in my head.

© Photo: Lobodecoya25

#11

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 m******d. I freaked the H**L 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 a*****e and freak me out on purpose, but it still disturbed me for a long time.

© Photo: EmotionalShelter8704

#12

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.

© Photo: Ok-Ad-9820

#13

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.

© Photo: creek_water_

#14

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.

© Photo: MortgageTasty3540

#15

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 d**n 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!**.

© Photo: Medium9

#16

Seeing my father who disappeared years prior on Omegle, while I was at a sleepover when I was a teen.

© Photo: shoom__

#17

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.

© Photo: guildedpasserby

#18

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. .

© Photo: tokke

#19

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, f*****g 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 a*s about stuff, so I just walked away – best decision I ever made.

© Photo: will_write_for_tacos

#20

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.

© Photo: niandun

#21

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 [darn] it didn’t have my face in it. I told him he was a piece of s**t, 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 [darn] out there got caught.

#22

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.

© Photo: geegol

#23

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.

#24

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.

© Photo: Equivalent8314

#25

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.

© Photo: No_Reputation8440

#26

Not me but back in University my housemate was friends with this beautiful French girl that looked like a legit model (she seemed really nice and sweet too). She had a stalker that would pester her online and through phone calls. He had multiple blogs about her, some were B**M related others were ads for sexual activities. He would always find her no matter how hard she tried to change phone numbers or change social media accounts. You could literally find only these gross blogs when googling her name, it ruined her whole digital existence.

He would also email the whole uni department about her, sometimes he’d send intimate pics he made of her, which got her in her professor’s offices quite often. She was being warned to make it stop or drop out.

Everyone started to avoid her because whoever befriended her for a long time ended up with their full name on a list on the blogs, which showed up on Google.

It looked like a really stressful thing to go through and no one could offer any help, there’s just nothing anyone could do. Actually, people started to blame her. Even her parents believed it was her fault as they thought it’s a boyfriend who wanted revenge or something like that.

Don’t know what ended up happening since I had to move out, but I felt for the girl. It was a stressful and isolating experience.

#27

Found at a girl states away from where i used to live had been taking photos from my buddy and i’s social medias and pretending to be our friends for over 2 years, photoshopping herself into photos, making fake inside jokes, talking about memories with us that never happened , i never knew this girl and neither did my friend , we only found out when one the girls this crazy lady knew in real life hit me up on instagram and sent me screenshots. every single account i had (and my friends) she had blocked, even the accounts that didn’t have my name attached to them. last i heard she wished me a happy birthday about 2 years ago using photos that were taken of me in the place i currently live.

#28

I was playing a game on xbox and there were a bunch of kids in the lobby being obnoxious as [darn] 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 [darn]’ 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.

#29

When I was a kid, early 90’s, went into a chatroom for psychics, a friend and I pretended to be psychic and messed with people. Someone messaged me later putting a curse on me…

© Photo: 1useforaname

#30

During Covid I had to teach my classes over Zoom. One class was an astronomy lab class over the summer. Even though we would not be meeting at the observatory and using the telescopes the university still scheduled the class for the regular time, 9 p.m. to 11:50 p.m.

I went over the lab and the simulation they were assigned, answered questions, then said goodnight at around 10:30 p.m. I stopped sharing the screen, the students logged off, but for some reason I forgot to end Zoom.

About an hour later I hear “Hello, is anyone there?” I thought it was someone in my backyard talking through the window screen (it was summer, so the widows were open at night). I didn’t know what was going on and quietly got out of bed in the dark to see who it was out there. Meanwhile I kept hearing “Hello, is anyone there?”

I could not see anything in the backyard except some feral cats that I fed, and they weren’t freaked out, which I’m sure they would have been is someone was in the backyard.

Finally the voice said “Professor [my name], are you there”. It took me a few seconds but I realized Zoom was still going and the voice was coming from someone probably miles away. Turned out it was a student who missed the Zoom session because they had to work late. Zoom normally shuts down on its own due to inactivity but I guess it had not reached the time limit yet,.

© Photo: MidnightOwl01

#31

Getting doxxed over Minecraft.

© Photo: Toru4

#32

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.

© Photo: Lenalov3ly

#33

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.

#34

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.

#35

… 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 s**t still haunts me.

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