12 People Who Learned the Hard Way That Online Friends Aren’t Always Real Friends

Making friends online can seem like a magical experience: conversations until dawn, laughs shared through memes, and the illusion of having found a digital soul mate. But what happens when you decide to bring that friendship into the real world? Well, sometimes things don’t go as planned. From encounters that ended in awkward situations to moments worthy of a horror movie, this article brings you stories of people who have experienced the dark side of meeting a virtual friend in person.

• Back in the second expansion of WoW, there was this guy in my guild that I’d become friends with mostly through other friends. We talked more and more over time and got pretty close. He had this bad roommate, and I could hear the guy sometimes, especially when something went wrong during a raid. He’d scream and throw fits, he sounded pretty awful. My friend told me that not only was he loud and obnoxious, but he was also abusive.
  
  I had my own place, so I said you know what, come stay with me. Just long enough to get you on your feet and in a safe place. He showed up at my place with a garbage bag full of his stuff and a laptop. I set him up in the apartment and tried to help him get a job. Well, he did not want a job. He did not get a job. He sat in my apartment day after day, eating my food and slowly draining my savings. No matter how hard I tried to motivate him, he just dug in his heels and somehow became more sedentary. Finally, I told him he had to go. I couldn’t afford to keep him there.
  
  He was just couch surfing. I talked to some people and finally figured out that his method of securing a new “temporary” place was to play on his friends’ sympathies and convince them that he was in a terrible living situation. It worked really well for me because he had this loud, obnoxious roommate to play off of. He ended up calling a nearby relative to come get him, I think his aunt. I don’t know what he told her that I allegedly did, but I have never seen a more venomous look from anyone in my life. As far as I know, he moved in with his sister and brother-in-law after that, but frankly, I don’t care where he ended up. He also stole a bunch of my stuff.
  
  That was the first and last time I ever did anything like that. @eclecticsed / Reddit

• My online friend flew into town to be a bridesmaid in my wedding. And she decided to cheat on her husband with one of the groomsmen and blame it on me. Because it was my wedding, so that clearly makes it my fault that she was unfaithful. @tlin0804 / Reddit
• I met a guy on MySpace when I was in college and we exchanged email addresses when we realized we lived in the same city. Eventually, I gave him my phone number and made plans for him to call me. But when he did, his voice scared me. It was what I thought a criminal would sound like. By the time I got over it and felt comfortable talking to him on the phone, I began to notice other red flags. Whenever I brought up the neighborhood, he would change the subject. At one point I asked him what his favorite restaurant on the boulevard was and he was hedging, so I made up a restaurant that I said was my favorite. He immediately said it was his favorite too and that he especially loved one of their dishes. He went on and on about this wonderful place that didn’t exist (and there was nothing like it in town, so he couldn’t be confused). I challenged him on the fact that he’d obviously never been to my neighborhood, and turns out he didn’t even live in the same state as me. @ScifiGirl1986 / Reddit
• I was 13 and had a 20-year-old pen pal in Hong Kong, both of us female. We met on Tumblr and emailed regularly. My parents were CC’ed in all of our correspondence, and we basically just talked about our cultures. After about a year of talking, she said that her university allowed her to study abroad in Europe for a semester, and she chose my country. Fun! I was excited.
  
  About 2 weeks before she was supposed to come, she emailed me to say that her dorm had to be cleaned out, so she wouldn’t be able to get into it the night she arrived. She needed a place to stay for the night. I asked my mom and she agreed to pick her up from the airport with me and she could stay with us for one night. So 2 weeks later we picked her up at the airport. And we didn’t click. She kind of annoyed me but it was late and so we just went home. We get home and we get her settled. We went up to my room, she gave me some presents and we talked a little bit. And suddenly she said, “Thanks for letting me stay here this semester!” Huh? Excuse me? This semester? I asked her, “What do you mean? You can stay here tonight. We can see each other on the weekends if you want to hang out, but you can’t stay here.” She gets quiet and then we go to sleep. At that point I just wanted her to leave. And I got what I wanted.
  
  The next morning I woke up and she’s gone. I don’t even know how she got out because we lock the doors at night, but she’s just gone. (We have special locks that require a key to open, and the key was somewhere else in the house). Her suitcase was still there. I tried calling her, she didn’t answer. She finally texted me and asked if my mom could drop off her suitcase at a train station 40 minutes away at a certain time. My mother brought the suitcase and that was it. I never saw or spoke to her again after that. @Unknown / Reddit

• We were online friends for years. We’d get together from time to time, and when we started families, we’d get together and take the kids to the zoos or whatever. She wanted us to go on a cruise together, with our husbands and kids. I said something like, “We can’t afford that,” and she went crazy. We shouldn’t have had kids if we can’t afford them, we shouldn’t have any more kids, our lives suck, blah, blah, blah, because I didn’t want to go on a cruise with her and her bratty kid. Sounds like a nightmare. @lovelovelovie / Reddit
• I met my online friend through a fandom. “D” was very normal, the rest of the group seemed to love him. About 4 years after being online friends, I met “D” in person and it went well. After that, my online activity decreased drastically due to being busy, and when I managed to get on FB, I checked my Messenger and saw a lot of messages from D asking why I wasn’t responding, what I was doing, could we arrange to meet up, etc. I explained that I was super busy and it was also the anniversary of my mum’s death so “just give me some time and we’ll see about meeting up another time”. He said “Oh, yeah, I forgot about the anniversary. You can have that day, but I expect an answer afterwards”. I blocked him so he sent me email after email after email asking me “what’s your problem, what do you think you’re doing”, so I blocked his email too.
  
  3 very peaceful weeks later there was a knock on my door. It was D, and he had a six-page letter detailing why we had to be friends, I shut the door and used an anonymous email thing to tell him if he contacted me again/showed up at my door I would call the police. I went on FB and told everyone about everything. The friends who had long since unfriended him started messaging me that they had stopped talking to him because of how creepy he was in PM’s about me always asking if they knew what I was doing, had I talked to them, was I seeing anyone, was I actually busy because he was convinced I wasn’t, etc.
  
  I haven’t heard a peep in over a year. He apparently deleted his FB and Instagram and thankfully just disappeared. @Unknown / Reddit

• I (25) was best friends with a woman (46) for almost six years. We talked for hours and sent each other gifts all the time. We shared everything from art to personal traumas. We were very close. When I fell on hard times, she was very kind and offered to take me in. I was so grateful that she would do that for me. After a few months, things began to change. I began to understand why she was such a lonely person. She was mean, if not cruel, to anyone who ever disagreed with her or even had a different opinion. I found out that she was cheating the disability services to get money from the government because she didn’t want her mother to track her spending. She was so horrible to her caregiver that I had to intervene several times, which she hated because it meant I wasn’t on her side. That’s when she turned on me.
  
  As soon as I realized how messed up and unstable she was, I told her I was moving out as soon as possible. And then, for the next week, she decided to make my life a living hell. She screamed about me to other people on the phone, told lies about me, said I did things I never did. And because she was a YouTuber with a huge following, she doxed me on social media, telling people that I had punched holes in her walls and keyed her car. She even called the police and tried to have me arrested for things I didn’t do. Her followers started harassing me. Then she started posting and sharing all of my personal secrets that I had told her in confidence.
  
  I finally had to call my family to come get me because she wanted to keep my dog so I would have to stay in contact with her and I no longer felt safe. So, after six months of living in hell and three years of Internet harassment and stalking that followed, I’m never going to meet anyone I met online again. I am not interested in online friends. It’s not safe. @Unknown / Reddit

• When I was in high school, I met a guy from another high school in a local chat room. We hit it off and after a few days we agreed to meet at the store I worked at after I got off work. Well, I guess he showed up a little early, with a friend, and came through my cash register. I thought it was him (we had exchanged photos), but I was really shy and didn’t want to be wrong. I waited for him to introduce himself, but he never did, and he and his friend paid for everything they had and left without a conversation.
  
  I was still hoping that this wasn’t the guy, so I waited for him for an hour after my shift. Of course, he never showed up, because that was definitely the guy. He just must have been disappointed when he saw me in the checkout line and instead of being a decent person and saying he wasn’t interested, he just ghosted me. If I could go back in time, I definitely would have said something to him in the checkout line. That’s my only regret. @rainydaymonday30 / Reddit
• I played WoW for years with a pretty regular group, got to know them offline, and at one point two of them, a couple, invited me to move across the country. At the time, I didn’t have anything tying me down where I was, so I packed up and moved. I got out here, moved in with my friends, and everything seemed okay. My buddy was a long-haul truck driver, so he was always gone for days at a time. His girlfriend kept trying to set me up with two of her friends at the same time (one in Minnesota).
  
  I ended up having a hard time finding work for a while, but finally got a job and was putting some money away while helping out with their kids. Then one day, out of nowhere, my buddy accused me of trying to hook up with his girl. Nothing had ever happened, but I had noticed that she was spending more and more time in my room when he wasn’t around. I knew his history and that his previous relationship had ended after she cheated on him with a friend of his. He wouldn’t listen, so I was kicked out without warning and they stole about $1,000 worth of my stuff and later moved. @IlatzimepAho / Reddit

• My online friend picked me up at the airport, which was very nice of him. But as soon as we got in the car, he started picking his nose. I looked away quickly so he wouldn’t know I caught him and be embarrassed if he tried to sneak one out before I noticed. If he did notice, he didn’t seem embarrassed, so I relaxed a bit. I figured maybe he was just so confident in himself and our friendship that he’d moved past worrying if I saw him taking care of a quick boog. Fine, sure. But when I finally looked back at him, he was wiping his fingers on his dashboard.
  
  To this day, I’m not really sure what to think, but this guy spent the entirety of the few hours we were together scooping out boogers and wiping them on parts of his car, or the table, or wherever it was that we stopped. I realized that I was being transported in a rolling booger shrine and that there was nothing I could touch without washing my hands. I was sitting on a crust of fossilized booger stuff. I had to be. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, he was a nice guy, but I ended up leaving our visit early because I couldn’t handle it. I don’t consider myself a clean freak, but when the wipes started piling up, it was all I could do not to throw the passenger door open and roll out into traffic to escape. @acunninghagfish / Reddit
• I was friends with a bunch of people I met through an online game. After about 2 years I decided to meet 2 of them. The 2 I met were a long distance couple, one from a country and the other from mine. They had met many times and spent 2 weeks together before they met me. We met in the city, said hello and hugged and did some tourist stuff, took their pictures, etc.
  
  But the whole time they didn’t really talk to me. At first I put it down to anxiety because I was nervous too. But even after lunch they just talked to each other and I felt left out. I even secretly took a video of them talking to each other and sent it to a friend who thought it was weird. When it was time for me to leave, I told them I had to go but I had a nice time and they continued to chat. I said it again, but there was no response, so I started to walk away until one of them said, “Oh, byeee”. I was really hurt. It was like they didn’t want me around. I had spent a lot of money coming down, especially since I didn’t have a job at the time. When I came back, I stopped talking to them. The friend I sent the video to sent them a message asking why they were ignoring me, and they tried to turn it on me, saying that I was the quiet one and that I was being rude to them, especially “leaving without saying goodbye”. I blocked them all in the game.
  
  A few months go by and one of them finds my social media and tries to reconnect. Starts off well and then goes back to blaming me. Haven’t met anyone from the internet since. @Dontmakemejungle / Reddit

• It was my friend “Kate” who befriended this girl “Jessica” who allowed us to stay with her when we traveled to the US. Jessica was immediately rude to me and kept my friend away from me. She’d let Kate share her bedroom and lock the door for hours on end, so I’d just go off and do my own thing. When it was time for Kate and I to move to another state, Jessica insisted on coming with us. The lady we were staying with in another state, “Robin”, called Jessica out on her weird behavior. Jessica then locked herself in a room and demanded that Kate stay in there with her. They were in there all day and eventually Kate came out and told me that something was wrong with Jessica and that she was actually scared. We (Kate and I) had plans to stay with another online friend, “Matt”, in another state and Jessica demanded that we cancel because she doesn’t like or trust Matt. We said no, this is our vacation and we paid for the flights and Jessica said then she will come with us but we can’t see Matt. We said no, she cried, we left. Kate blocked her from everything.
  
  No long after that, Kate’s mom called us and said that Jessica had contacted her crying and said that Kate was in danger and that we had abandoned Jessica and that she was so worried about my friend’s safety. It was unbelievably scary. Kate later found out from another girl, “Jane” (they all knew each other from a forum) that Jessica had told everyone they were in love. She denied it 100%. Jessica was just obsessed with her, and months later Kate heard that Jessica was telling everyone that she was saving money to come to our country to find Kate. Luckily she never did. @njf85 / Reddit

So the next time you plan to meet your internet friend, make sure it’s in a public place and that you have a quick escape route, just in case. Because, as these stories have shown us, what looks like a dream friendship can turn into a nightmare in a matter of seconds. And if you’re in the mood for more stories that will make you think twice before trusting a stranger online, you can read this article here about social media encounters that went completely wrong.