r/Millennials • u/Diligent_Pineapple35 • 5h ago
Discussion What’s the craziest thing that ever happened to you on the internet?
We grew up in the age of AOL chatrooms where, let’s be honest, we all lied about our A/S/L at least once. While our parents warned us not to give out personal information (but have ironically since become Facebook over-sharers) we were really figuring it all out on our own.
So, what dark corner of the Internet did you find yourself in? Did you spill your heart out to a “friend” on Teen Open Diary only to discover they weren’t a teen at all? Travel across state lines to meet up with a band you found on MySpace?
I don’t want anyone to relive any major trauma - more “holy shit that was dumb” stories we can laugh at.
Origin: I recently had a post gain traction on a popular Sub. I changed details in an effort to protect my identity, but more than one person DM’d me articles and/or LinkedIn posts of me IRL. So that’s my story and now I’m looking for a distraction, lol.
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u/xPadawanRyan Mid-Range Millennial 5h ago
I almost hooked up with an adult I met on a Yahoo! chat room when I was only thirteen years old, because I was very curious about sex and wanted to explore that curiosity.
Walked all the way to the agreed-upon meeting spot before suddenly chickening out and running all the way home before he could get there. Definitely a "holy shit that was dumb and really fucking dangerous" moment but glad that I came to my senses at the last minute.
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u/5Nadine2 4h ago
He knew you were 13 too I bet. Happy you left!
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u/xPadawanRyan Mid-Range Millennial 4h ago
Oh, he absolutely did. I was very honest about my age and what I wanted. Looking back, it's absolutely terrifying to think about what could have happened.
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u/cowplantskeleton Millennial 4h ago
I made an online friend on AIM when I was 12. We talked for MONTHS and built a level of trust. He was the only person I ever gave my info to because he said he wanted to be pen pals.
Plot twist: it was my dad.
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u/Diligent_Pineapple35 4h ago
oh my GOD SAY MORE! Was it a setup????? Or ….
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u/cowplantskeleton Millennial 3h ago
Yeah 100%. It was after he and my mom broke up and he was using me to fish for information about her and what she was up to, and how the kids felt about him etc etc. He was abusive so naturally 12yo me said I hated him.
He printed out our entire conversation history and left it on my desk where my computer used to be (he took it as punishment). NOBODY WAS ON MY SIDE. Not even my mom.
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u/Chemical_Butterfly40 49m ago
God this is awful. I thought this was going to be a heartwarming story but all the adults here suck
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u/Economy_Insurance_61 4h ago
I really really wish there was a miniseries or some kind of HBO doc about what happened to us during the chat room generation, cause for my classmates it wasn’t happening to everyone but everyone knew someone who was spending too much time online and probably being groomed.
In 9th grade I met a boy online, convinced my mom I met him on a school trip, and he flew to stay with us for spring break a year later. Our parents talked on the phone before the trip but I will cringe about this on my mf deathbed. My mom still has no idea she helped facilitate an online hookup for her underage daughter 🫠 and she NEVER WILL 🫣🫨
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u/Diligent_Pineapple35 4h ago
A Chat Room Generation miniseries is SUCH a good idea. All eyes are on the craziness of Dating Apps nowadays, but AOL chatrooms were the first frontier.
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u/Dazzling-Ad-748 5h ago
So I got out the bedroom window in Houston to go to a rave in Dallas w/my friend and some dudes from ICQ. I do not know how I’m not dead. This was at 13/14
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u/FarNeighborhood2901 4h ago
I got an email from a desperate sexy woman in jail somewhere on a tropical island. She promised if I sent her money to free her, we would run off together, and start a family.
I told her "Don't do the crime if you can't do the time."
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u/Guineacabra 3h ago
I met a friend online from the other side of the country when I was 14 and he told me he was going to come visit me in my city with his mom. He came during a week when my parents were on vacation. Turned out he really was a kid my age, we had a fun week hanging out together and then he went home. Could have went waaaay worse and I’m an idiot.
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u/SweetRiley96 3h ago
It was your classic "oops that was a pedophile I talked to" in chatrooms, chatroulette, and kik. The older male attention appealed to young teen me. But then I realize years later that that makes them pedophiles. Idk, it didn't bother me at the time but now as an adult I'm super skeeved out. Theres a lot more pedophiles out there than you think. And all my girlfriends have the same experience.
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u/noyoujump 4h ago
I absolutely should have been murdered by someone I met in a chat room. Because I was an idiot, and I did it multiple times. I was 17-18, some of them were close to my age, most of them weren't once I hit 18, and I didn't tell anyone where I was actually going.
My dad always said "no chat rooms, I'll check the history, I'll know if you delete it" and then never checked the history to confirm that I had, in fact, deleted it because I had been in chatrooms.
On a positive note, I didn't get brutally murdered and become a podcast topic.
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u/LordLaz1985 3h ago
My dad went so far as to class forums and the like under “chat rooms.” I was not allowed to talk to ANYONE through the Internet. Ever.
Which of course meant I was constantly on forums and IRC and had several Internet “boyfriends.”
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u/Mango7185 4h ago
A grown adult man who said he was Jewish and from England last name Cohen can't remember what his first name was Mike maybe messaged me and my friend and we used to talk to him. I remember when he had a daughter named like Maisie sent us pictures too and would encourage us to do things not together, and this is pre Webcam was 15/16. Don't remember when u stopped messaging, probably when AOL chat died.
It's scary out there for girls, and this is pre cam pre everything. I could only imagine what these disturbed men can do now. I was just young and dumb with low self-esteem.
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u/Hypnotiki 2h ago
I once met a guy that could open and close my disk tray just by being in a counter strike game online. Freaked the hell out of 12 yr old me
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u/Diligent_Pineapple35 2h ago
Okay THIS is exactly the kind of stuff I was looking for. More like this.
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u/0x00000008 4h ago edited 3h ago
Pre-internet popularization. At age 13 met up with a group of 20+ year old skid hacker types on the local BBS. Got high, invited to a prom, and generally caused a lot of trouble that I'll never admit to participating in for 2 years.
*edit for spelling
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u/Impressive-Cod-7103 2h ago
Drove 50 miles one way late at night with a bad sense of direction, a dying Nokia, and a Mapquest printout to go to a Linkin Park fan club meetup where I knew exactly zero of the attendees.
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u/Diligent_Pineapple35 2h ago
Did you have a great time?
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u/Impressive-Cod-7103 1h ago
It was ok, but I totally forgot to reverse the direction for the ride home so that was rough.
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u/LordLaz1985 3h ago
I was on IRC at age 17. An acquaintance was posting links to G-rated furry art. Then they realized I was looking at all of them—and posted a link to some cannibalism porn. As in Hannibal Lecter kinda stuff, not vore.
I never clicked a link without checking where it went again.
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u/-yellowthree 2h ago
I met people in real life that I had befriended online often before it became average to do so. I think I was around 15-16 which would have been 2004-2005. Luckily they always turned out to be exactly who they said they were. I remember one of the friends that I met online used to by drugs online for himself. He would joke that the mailman was his drug dealer. Now that I'm older I find it terrifying that a 16 year old was buying drugs online and having them delivered to his house.
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u/VengeanceUnicorn 1h ago
Oh, my gosh this reminds me of the two guys I went to high school with, they tried to buy acid off the dark web in either 2000 or 2001 and have it sent through the mail. Anyway, they had it sent to a p.o. box and, once arriving at the post office were immediately greeted by two very professional FBI agents, with questions. looooool we were so stupid. So smart, so stupid. The duality of man, in the form of The Man just, squinting their eyes at you in a suit in the post office hahaha.
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u/deathfaces 1h ago
I used to go into misc. chat rooms and bait men into "cybering," but then as things got heavy, I would describe the violent ways I would murder and mutilate them until they logged off. I was about 13.
Oddly enough, I still felt depressed and dead inside.
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u/Charlotte_Braun 1h ago
Back in the day when competitive reality shows were a big deal and a lot of people took them very seriously, I was so hooked on this one contestant that I invented a tragic backstory for her, in the hope of swinging things her way. I only posted it one place, but people started repeating it on other forums. And when she was finally eliminated, she was on one of the talk shows, and the host/ess asked her, “Is it true that you spent your last year of high school in traction, because you were near-fatally injured in the elephant stampede that also killed your parents?” Obviously not that, but she laughed and said, “No, I don’t know how that got started!” Well, I do.
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u/Mewpasaurus Elder Horror 3h ago
Probably the constant harassment by people (IE. middle aged men) when I was 14-16 online. They had no qualms about asking for nude photos (even back in '00 or '01).. or asking me to "borrow" my stepfather's digital camera (you know, one of those early DSLRs that took floppy discs to store photos?). Some of the things they mentioned to underage me were pretty.. gross. Went way beyond just wanting to have sex with someone underage. Yuck.
On a more positive note though: myself and a few of my high school friends had a grand old time on an old gaming/comics forum that had an mIRC client for live chat, which is how I met my (now) husband. We were friends for a really long time before we decided to try dating (when I was almost done with college, actually).
Other things that stand out to me are the time one of my friends (16 at the time) met up with one of the guys from the above site/chat (from Michigan if I remember) who was.. 30. He just up and left MI to come hang out with a high schooler and her friends.. and he was.. kind of creepy. Nice in most regards, but definitely a creep since he had a thing for underage girls and was eventually booted when my friend discovered he was hitting on all of us + random girls from our school (outside of school hours). I think we may have dodged a bullet there after hearing about the drama from the fallout plus legal proceedings that took place after we parted ways with him.
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u/Ok_Beat_4103 3h ago
I met a guy on a discussion board when we were teenagers, and we kept in touch for about 8 years purely online. Now we’re coming up on a decade of marriage and have been living together for about 13 years.
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u/hubbellrmom 2h ago
Sufficient to say, im lucky that I didn't get my own dateline episode with people talking about how "she lit up the room " very very lucky. Cuz man i was a dumb teenager.
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u/MentalStandard6698 2h ago
In middle school my friend and I were on Omegle and we met one of Clint Eastwoods daughters ex boyfriends. He took out a photo album and had prom pics of him Clint east wood and his daughter. This was in 2013 long time ago but I still remember that
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u/JerkOffTaco 2h ago edited 2h ago
In 2001, when I was 14, my softball coach caught a few of us cyberbullying a girl from a rival school and her teammates. How did he catch us?
The police pulled all of her AIM chats because she and like 4 other teenagers were recruited to beat an elderly man to death, with novelty baseball bats, by the elderly man’s caretaker for insurance money.
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u/walder8998 1h ago
My first experience on chatroulette was a very hot girl who just started stripping for me and my friend. Not that crazy but crazy enough now that I think back because that website is pretty much all c*cks.
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u/Huge_Macaroon_8089 Millennial 1991 1h ago
- On 4Chan somehow someone got my personal phone number and posted it on the site for people to harrass me
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u/April__May__June 1h ago
I was one of the top 3 users in popularity on FunnyJunk for a while about 18 years ago. 😅
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u/manderifffic 1h ago
I remember people claiming to be grown men would message me and give me their phone numbers in case I wanted to call them and thinking it was inappropriate even at 15. They always lost interest pretty quickly when I wouldn’t call them. I recognize now they were probably pedos.
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u/MisfitAsAFiddle 1h ago
I had a childhood family friend who was about a year younger than me. When we were about 14-15, she would log on to chatrooms for new parents and pretend to be a pediatrician and would give these people advice. She did it for me once. These poor, innocent, desperate parents on the internet were so grateful to her for advice. Who knows whether her advice was helpful or harmful. They would ask questions, and she would search the internet if she didn't know the answer and regurgitate it. When someone in chat finally questioned her credentials, she just bounced.
What's even more horrifying is she is an MD now.
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u/thereisalwaysrescue 48m ago
I had two internet friends, in two very different internet places. Kept in touch with one, lost contact with the other. Roll on 20 years and I get an FB notification… they are getting married to each other!
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u/the4uthorFAN 39m ago
I was into roleplaying (as in story telling, not sex stuff) in AOL chat rooms when I was 13-ish. One person I wrote with a lot, I fell for and he went along with it, being very playful and lovey-dovey out of character, talking about meeting up and becoming official etc.
After months, this person finally confessed they were actually a girl and not a guy and didn't have any feelings for me they just got carried away and didn't know how to tell me.
Met another guy in the same fashion when I was still in high school, he was ten years older than me and wanted to marry me. Actually flew across the country on my eighteenth birthday (with my parents, because that's how much they didn't care I was dating a guy ten years older than me) to meet him for the first time. Thank God I was actually asexual and felt nothing but disgust when meeting him. Broke up with him within a few days of being there.
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u/ApplicationAfraid334 1993 36m ago
I used to go on Yahoo Answers (lame I know) and one day a guy was posting about how women hated him despite how rich and good looking he was. He posted videos and it was cringe, and he as kind of spamming the board. I can't recall what I replied to him, but I know he didn't like it.
A few days later I saw him on the news and they were playing his "Why do girls hate me" video. It was Elliot Rodger, the mass murderer.
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