The Lets Read Podcast - 250: THE MOST EVIL CYBERCRIMINAL YOU'VE NEVER HEARD OF | 26 True Scary Stories | EP 238

Episode Date: July 30, 2024

This episode includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about the dark web, yard sale encounters & one mountain biker's worst fear HAVE A STORY TO SUBMIT? www.Reddit.com/r/LetsReadOfficial Or over email: [e-mail] FOLLOW ME ON - ►YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/c/letsreadofficial ► Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/letsread.official/ ► Twitter - https://twitter.com/LetsRead ♫ Music & Audio Mix: INEKT https://www.youtube.com/@inekt Today's episode is sponsored by BetterHelp

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Let's hurry then! To my count. 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2. Visit Specsavers.ca for details. Born on July 17th of 1997, Chloe Ayling grew up in the South London suburb of Colesden. She was raised by a single mother who worked hard to ensure that her daughter had everything she needed to thrive in both her education and her social life. After excelling in her GSE exams at the age of 16, Chloe went on to study psychology, business, and law at a local sixth-form college. She told her mother that she aspired to be a lawyer, but in late 2014, Chloe became pregnant and dropped out of school. She was a young woman in crisis. As a newly expectant mother, she had zero prospects and a deeply uncertain future.

But at the same time, Chloe was deeply committed to providing a prosperous future for both herself, her mother, and her unborn child. Having enjoyed athletics and physical training while at school, Chloe decided to pursue a fast-track sports science qualification that would open the door to enjoyable work and decent wages. Yet during her period of study, she was approached by a modeling agent who proposed that she put together a portfolio. After a number of successful, highly publicized shoots, she was signed to the UK's prestigious Supermodel Agency, headed by the notorious Phil Green. 56-year-old Green founded the not-so-creatively named Supermodel Agency back in 1987 and was once accused of being a little more than a high-society pimp after he admitted to arranging parties involving wealthy celebrities and the girls

on his payroll. Green has since insisted that there was nothing inappropriate about these parties, and a brief police investigation concluded that, while somewhat sleazy, his actions hadn't broken any laws. Yet we can't help but wonder if his penchant for making arrangements didn't factor into the fate of the newly signed 20-year-old Chloe Ayling. In March of 2017, Green received a phone call from a man calling himself Andre Lazio, who wished to hire one of his models for a photo shoot in Paris. Green decided Chloe was the best girl for the job, and in early April, he sent her off to Paris for a few days to complete the shoot. Yet just hours before it was due to commence, Lazio contacted Green to cancel. He apologized profusely but promised to call back in a few months once the shoot could be reorganized. Green was displeased with the cancellation, yet Lazio proved true to his word and in July of that same year, he called back for another proposal, this time in the Italian city of Milan on July 12th of 2017. Green agreed to the

arrangement, but there was one small problem. There was no Andre Lazio, and Green had inadvertently shepherded his client into one of the most harrowing ordeals of her entire life. When Chloe failed to return home on the expected date, her terrified mother contacted Mr. Green to voice her fears. Mr. Green then attempted to contact the fictitious Andre Lazio, but none of his calls were answered. The next morning, Mr. Green noticed an unread email in his inbox, and upon opening it, his jaw hit the floor. The email stated that Chloe was now the property of an organization known as Black Death Group. In conjunction with Chloe's family, Mr. Green had 72 hours to deposit 300,000 euros worth of cryptocurrency into an online wallet, or she'd be auctioned off to the highest bidder via a dark web slave auction.

The only signature on the email read, MD. A horrified Phil Green immediately reached out to the British consulate in Milan and requested immediate assistance in rescuing his imperiled client. Then, in coordination with British diplomats, the Italian police conducted a raid on the property believed to be Andre Lazio's photography studio. Once inside, the officers discovered it was no studio, but rather a filthy, cramped apartment with no electricity or running water. The place was empty and it looked to have been abandoned for quite some time, yet piled up in the corner of the bedroom were several pieces of clothing,

all of which were soon confirmed to be Chloe's. To some, it was an encouraging development. If her whereabouts could be tracked, it was only a matter of time before Chloe was returned home. Yet investigators had a very different perspective. You see, although some of Chloe's belongings had been recovered, there was no other forensic or digital evidence recovered from the apartment. There was no addresses to stake out, no phone numbers to tap, no persons of interest to keep tabs on. Nothing. For all intent and purpose, Chloe Ayling had simply dropped off the face of the earth. Yet less than a week after she disappeared, investigators were stunned when

a young woman walked into the British consulate in Milan. They recognized the disheveled young woman in an instant. It was Chloe Ayling. She was in the company of a 30-year-old Polish computer programmer named Łukasz Herba, who previously lived in the UK, but at the time of Chloe's disappearance, claimed to have been living in Rome. Both were taken into different rooms and extensively questioned by police. Then, as the interviews unfolded, the story that emerged was nothing short of preposterous. After being ushered into a small interview room, Chloe recalled the events of the day she vanished. After waking up in the dinghy, cramped apartment she'd been assigned,

Chloe was informed that a taxi would be arriving for her within the hour. She'd already complained to Phil Green regarding the condition of her accommodation, but she was told that there was little he could do. All of the local hotels were booked up and, unless she could find her own, Chloe would have to make do with the lodgings provided. It's only for one night, Green was reported to have said. Just get the shoot done, get paid, then after you fly back we won't have to work with them again. Reluctantly, Chloe agreed to continue the plan and, after the arrival of her taxi, she was driven to a secluded warehouse just outside

of Milan. For some, the choice of location would have immediately struck them as suspicious, yet for glamour model Chloe, it was nothing out of the ordinary. Many of her previous modeling assignments had been in unusual spaces, such as disused warehouses or derelict office spaces, and what appeared to be a deserted shell on the outside was actually a hive of activity on the inside, with pristine white backdrops surrounded by thousands of dollars worth of cameras and lighting equipment. But on this occasion, when Chloe walked inside the warehouse, she was greeted by utter silence.

Freshly printed pieces of A4 paper with the word photoshoot written on them directed her to a small office room in the center of the warehouse, and after knocking on the door, Chloe suddenly heard someone rushing up behind her. When I felt a gloved hand over my mouth and nose, I panicked, she later said. My head was being held back, another arm pinning me across the neck. Then I saw another masked man rush in front of me with a needle. I tried to fight, but I couldn't. He grabbed my right arm, pushed up my sleeve, and I was wrestled to the floor. The masked man was over me, the syringe piercing my skin, and that's the last thing I remember. Sometime later Chloe awoke in pitch darkness and quickly realized she couldn't move.

She was still incredibly disoriented from the sedatives she'd been forcibly injected with and it's possible that this was the only thing that prevented her from suffering a severe panic attack once she realized she was confined to a terrifyingly constricting space. There was black rubbery material all around me, and I soon realized that I was in some kind of bag, Chloe later said. I tried to open my mouth, but I couldn't. There was tape across it. Eventually, I managed to peel it off so I could breathe properly, but that's how I realized that there was metal around my wrists and ankles. They'd been handcuffed too. Chloe recalled later in front of her was a small hole in the fabric of whatever she was imprisoned in. She pressed her hands together and forced her arms up until the tips of her fingers had reached it.

Then, with all her might, she pushed, watching as the opening widened with just the smallest amount of effort. It was a zipper, and as she slowly freed herself from the confines of the bag, Chloe realized that she was in the trunk of a moving car. I tried to make some noise, to try and get the driver's attention, she recalled, so I was kicking my legs and screaming my head off. It worked, and Chloe soon felt the car coming to a stop. She then heard two loud bangs as both the driver and passenger side doors were opened and closed. The next thing she knew, there was a light and fresh air as the trunk that she was held prisoner in was suddenly opened. Yet staring back at her, back dropped by the night sky, were her two masked abductors.

As tears filled her eyes and her voice shook with terror, Chloe demanded the men to tell her what was going on. Neither replied. They simply reapplied the tape around her mouth, tightened her handcuffs, and then pushed her back into the duffel bag that she had only just escaped from. Sometime later, the car stopped again. But this time, once her kidnappers opened up the trunk, Chloe realized they had driven her to a highly secluded location far from any major highway. The first time the trunk had opened, she detected the faint orange glow of streetlights, but the second time, there was nothing but the starry night sky to greet her. As she was dragged from the starry night sky to greet her.

As she was dragged from the trunk, the terror of uncertainty was overwhelming. Chloe once again tore the tape from her mouth and began begging her captors to tell them where they were. You not get hurt, was all they said. Then according to Chloe, they pretended not to know where she was being taken. I started to cry, she later said. It all just hit me at once and I couldn't help it. I cried for my mom and for my baby boy. I didn't know if I would ever see them again. Chloe was taken into what appeared to be some kind of farmhouse, then spent her first day and night handcuffed to a water pipe in the basement.

She was fed minimal food and water and suffered heavily from the residual effects of the sedatives she'd been given, which were later revealed to be ketamine. On her second night, one of her kidnappers reappeared, but this time, he wasn't wearing any mask. He had a boyish face, close-cropped hair and pale blue-green eyes. Then as he approached, Chloe began to tremble with terror. Yet to her infinite relief, the man appeared to reassure her in broken English, then asked if she wanted to share his bed for the night. I'm not going to say no, I wanted to stay handcuffed in the furniture, she later said.

I would never object to something that he wants me to do in that time because I didn't want to upset him or make him angry. Why would I be nasty to him when he was my only way out? In terms of ensuring her survival, Chloe said that she had one lone strategy, win her captor's sympathy. She didn't need to fake the tears that she wept for her infant son back home. He'd been wondering where mummy was, crying for her, and after repeatedly sharing this with her maskless captor, he began to display an obvious sympathy for her. Then bizarrely, Chloe's nameless captor asked if she'd be interested in dating him. The question horrified her, yet she shrewdly used it to her advantage.

Obviously I had no interest, but I had to play it as if I did, she explained. It was the only thing I had to focus on to get out. I hated drama at school. I'm too shy for that. But what else could I do? She told the man that, in the future, if she was released safe and sound, she could possibly see herself dating him. The man became visibly excited at the prospect. Then, seeing his opportunity, Chloe asked the man his name. My name is Lucas,

he replied. Lucas Herba. Chloe didn't realize it, but she'd seen that name before. In fact, she actually met Lucas Herba face to face just months before her capture. Yet due to the stress of her experience, these little factoids would remain beyond her recollection. Yet when Lucas finally decided to remind her, it was a moment of chilling significance. Six days into Chloe's captivity, Lucas walked down into the basement where she was being held and locked the door behind him. He looked frightened. Chloe feared the worst and as he began to talk, she hung on to every word as if her life depended on it. In reality, their first encounter had been three and a half months earlier during the debacle of the cancelled photoshoot in Paris. Upon learning of the cancellation, Chloe was assured that someone was on their way to give her money for a taxi and a plane ticket, and that man was Lucas Urba.

Lucas went on to explain that he was a member of the Black Death Group, a violent Romanian people smuggling ring. Chloe began to panic, but Lucas was quick to reassure her, claiming that she wasn't going to be sold into slavery because he wanted to leave the organization. However, in order to do so, he needed to raise 300,000 euros to buy his freedom, and that's where Chloe came in. Originally, he had been ordered to kidnap her back in April where they'd met in Paris, but had refused his orders upon learning that Chloe was a single mother. According to Lucas, his superiors severely reprimanded him for his insolence and set about organizing another snatch attempt. Lucas claimed that he begged for redemption, and was thus allowed a position in the Milan snatch squad in order to regain his boss's favor.

But unbeknownst to them, he had other plans. After explaining his position to Chloe, Lucas made it clear that it was in her interest to help secure the ransom money. Only one of his Black Death colleagues knew where they were and it was only a matter of time before they returned and got wise to his scheme. If that happened, Lucas would be killed and Chloe would be immediately sold into slavery, where a fate worse than death awaited her. Wukas even explained that in one instance, a customer who'd grown bored of his purchase had her fed to tigers as a form of entertainment.

Naturally, Chloe was paralyzed with fear, and although she could practically taste her freedom, she maintained her veneer of mild-mannered compliance. When Lucas asked who might have the money to pay her ransom, Chloe replied with the names of three older men, whose identities have never been made public. And this is when Lucas sent an email to Phil Green, demanding the 300,000 euros under the pseudonym MD. He also included the names of the men Chloe had listed as being capable of paying the ransom. One of these men was said to be able to have 30,000 euros immediately

to hand and could have it converted to cryptocurrency then deposited into a count of Lukasz's choosing within the 72-hour time frame. The offer was nowhere near the 300,000 needed to secure Chloe's freedom, yet bizarrely, Lucas chose to release her anyway. He did, however, have a number of conditions. Not only would he require an additional 50,000 euros in bitcoin, Chloe would be responsible for spreading word of the Black Death Group in the United Kingdom, essentially as a way of spreading fear via propaganda. He claimed to have compromised with his superiors, who had laid out a new set of conditions for his departure from the group. Chloe agreed to his every stipulation, knowing she'd abandon her promises once she was safely back in the UK. Once Chloe had sworn to obey his

commands, Lucas drove her to Milan with the intention of escorting her to the British consulate. But before that, something rather unusual occurred. Lukas had previously assured Chloe that any escape attempt on her part would be futile. The Black Death had agents everywhere and, using a sophisticated system of signals and intelligence, would find and track her within minutes, not hours. Yet when they arrived back in Milan, the one place Chloe would have gravitated to during a potential escape attempt, Lukas seemed happy to waltz around the piazzas without a care in the world. He took Chloe to a cafe, they ate lunch together, then he bought her a pair of shoes as some kind of bizarre parting gift. After that, Lukasz walked her to the British consulate,

totally under the impression that he'd be free to simply walk away after dropping her off. Even when asked to step into an interview room, Lukasz seemed perfectly confident he'd done nothing wrong. But as we know now, nothing could have been further from the truth. Yet as Chloe and Lukas' interview unfolded, the police took umbrage with one particular detail. She claimed that all her new clothes had been given to her at the farmhouse, yet when it was discovered the shoes were a recent purchase, the police checked the CCTV footage, they spotted Chloe and Lukas holding hands. Chloe had neglected to tell the whole truth regarding the day's events and to her horror it seemed to cast doubt on her entire story.

It was the end of the interview. I'd been speaking for 12 hours and I just wanted to leave, Chloe later said. I thought that that would be another whole load of questions and it would drag on for so much longer so I just didn't mention it. After she was returned home, it became increasingly obvious to Chloe that more and more of those investigating her kidnapping believed it to be some kind of hoax. It was so bad. I was shocked. I'd spent 12 hours giving as much detail as I can. Then one thing I don't mention and they don't believe me, she said. I was angry and frustrated, and I just broke down. Upon her return, she was questioned by a number of high-profile media personalities, one of which openly questioned the veracity of her story.

No one can say that you should have acted in a certain way. How would you know how to react? Anything you think will get you free, you just gotta do it. She replied, If you just refuse to do anything, they say most people wouldn't come out alive. I'd rather have acted as I did and be here right now rather than act as people say I should have. When asked why she hadn't tried to make a break for it as soon as they arrived in Milan, Chloe replied, I was grateful to him. I relied on this man totally, even to this point where, when he wanted to drop me 20 minutes from the consulate, I

couldn't bear to think about being separated from him, because I thought other members of the Black Death would get me in the time that it took to walk there. It seems that, until the end, Chloe genuinely believed that Wukash was a member of the elusive and terrifying Black Death Group, but again, the reality couldn't have been any further from the truth. In the weeks following Chloe's return, and the media firestorm that followed in her wake, the Black Death Group gained more publicity than they ever could have wished for. There was just one problem. They didn't exist.

At least, not in the form that Wookish had described. You see, there was a group of scammers operating on the dark web circa 2016 who did indeed call themselves the Black Death Group. However, they were not in the business of human trafficking, and were more focused on things like scamming Apple Store gift cards from small-time code dealers. After a number of screenshots depicting Black Death Group websites began to circulate back in the UK, it became apparent that they were legitimately trying to sell Chloe via a dark web auction, but again, this proved to be a complete fiction.

The truth is, Lukasz collaborated with the Black Death Group members to create mock-ups of a slave auction site and promised to pay them handsomely once his plan was successful. It's entirely possible these mysterious darklings decided to leak the screenshots once they learned no money was headed their way. Amateur cybercrime researcher and self-proclaimed transhumanist Chris Montero wrote up a phenomenal debunking of the Black Death Group on his blog, Pirate.London. There, he thoroughly proves that not only were the Black Death Group barely anything to worry about in terms of crimes they committed, but their role in Chloe's abduction was severely overstated in weeks following her return. Essentially, what happened here was a very poorly planned and very poorly executed

kidnapping committed by a dangerous, unhinged, and selfish young man. At his trial, Wukish seemed to change his story and attempted to exploit the rumors of a hoax by claiming all he'd done was try to boost his girlfriend's career with a fake scandal. Thankfully, the jury saw through his defense, and on June 11th of 2018, he was sentenced to 16 years and 9 months in prison. Lukasz's brother, Michael Erba, who ran a transport logistics company called Her Trans Logistics Limited, also participated in the kidnapping. Based on email and forensic evidence, he was extradited from the UK to Italy in October 2018, and the following year, he was sentenced to 16 years and 8 months in prison.

The story of Chloe's kidnap and confinement is one of the most complex and convoluted ever covered on this channel. As we've stated, Chloe has been publicly accused of manufacturing her kidnap in order to boost her career, and although this can be said for certain other celebrities in recent years, it's clear that Khloe was not lying. Lukasz Erba, in a pathetically selfish attempt to romance a girl he'd first stumbled across on Facebook, became the victim of his own scheme. He believed that he had fooled Chloe into believing in the Black Death Group's near-limitless power, and to an extent, that's true. But Wookish was being fooled in return, by a girl who'd utilized her feminine wiles and some rather convincing acting in order to secure her eventual release. In a sense, what you just heard is a story of competing bluffs, and to her credit,

it seems that Chloe Ayling was somehow both the victim and the victor. Born on January 13th of 1963, Peter Gerard Scully was born and raised in the Australian city of Melbourne. Little is known about his childhood, though it's believed that he was raised Catholic by two strict Scotch-Irish parents. After graduating university, Peter made a living as some kind of property developer and became exceptionally wealthy in the process. By the mid-2000s, Peter was living with his wife and two children in a large four-bedroom house in suburban Melbourne. He had a life that almost anyone would be envious of, but one day, his entire world began to fall apart. In 2011, Peter and his partners were forced to declare bankruptcy after a development scheme of theirs appeared to completely fall through. Very little work had been done on the actual construction site, yet Peter and his company claimed that every penny of the $2.6 million investment fund was gone.

Naturally, their investors weren't happy and initiated legal proceedings against Peter and his partners. Peter claimed that he could account for losses in a way that was perfectly legal, but in reality, he was already preparing to flee the country. For years, he had been scamming investors out of their money in what amounted to a very well-disguised Ponzi scheme. By the time it emerged that Peter was indeed acting illegally, he had already fled Australia on a false passport before establishing an entirely new identity in the Philippines capital of Manila. Once he'd established a degree of anonymity, and knowing that Manila was the first place Filipino police would look for him,

Peter traveled over land and sea before reaching the southernmost island on Mindanao. It was here that Peter began setting up a new life for himself, and although he'd managed to flee Australia with a sizable amount of investors' cash, his expensive tastes meant that it would only be a matter of months before he was flat broke again. Peter needed a way of earning a living, yet he couldn't do so legally as it'd almost certainly give away his location to the authorities. He obviously wasn't afraid of operating outside of legal constraints, but with his reputation and tatters, there was no way of him securing any reliable outside investment. Peter needed money, he needed a lot of it, and he needed it quickly. So he turned to the darkest and most depraved of all online marketplaces, the exploitation of children. With the help of two Filipina women named Karma Ann Alvarez and Lizo Margario Castaña,

Peter began setting up one of the most evil and prolific child exploitation websites in contemporary history. He would send Alvarez and Castaña out into some of Mindanao's poorest towns and villages, promising generous financial compensation to the parents of any child willing to hand them over for the purposes of a photo shoot. The children were then returned a few days later, visibly shaken but with sizable wads of cash with them. The children either never spoke of the ordeals they'd faced at the hands of Peter and his so-called girlfriends, and those that did were either hushed up or disregarded. The harrowing abuse that took place at Peter's photo shoots were recorded before the videos were uploaded onto a dark web messaging forum that he created named No Limits Fun.

The most notorious of these videos was entitled Daisy's Destruction and depicts the despicable abuse of three underage Filipino girls. A mere preview was uploaded to the webpage while Peter offered visitors the full unedited recording for around $10,000. One of the most active of the abusers in the tape is the 19-year-old Liesl Margallo, who had herself been trafficked at a similar age as the children that she ended up abusing. For five long years, Peter and his accomplices continued to traffic and abuse children until one day, Karma Alvarez appeared to have had a change of heart.

To Karma's knowledge, Peter's routine was simple. He'd trick a parent into giving him their child, record their exploitation, then return them with money. But even this had proved too burdensome on her conscience. She apparently pressured him to raise his age bracket, so to speak, and to introduce alcohol to the girls so they didn't suffer as much during the abuse. Peter seemed to have agreed to this, as in 2015, he coaxed two teenage girls back to his home with the promise of food and alcohol. The girls came willingly at first, but when it became evident that Peter planned to abuse them, and to document it no less, they attempted to escape. Peter and his photographer, the identity of whom remains unclear, apprehended the girls in the process of their escape, before brutally beating them and dragging them into the home's earthen cellar.

There, each girl was forced to dig their own grave, before Peter announced that they were to be buried alive. The girls begged and pleaded for their lives, swearing on all they held dear that they'd never breathe a word of what had occurred that evening. It was only then that Peter planned to let them go, confident that fear would forever seal their lips. But before that, he decided to hang on to them for a few more days, just to make sure that he'd made his point clear. It was during this period of captivity that the girls were discovered chained up in the basement by Karma Alvarez. Horrified at what Peter had done, she waited until Peter left the house and then freed the girls from their bindings and allowed them to escape. She then drove to the nearest police station and told the whole grim tale to a pair of dumbstruck police officers.

To locate and infiltrate Peter's dark web exploitation ring, the Filipino police enlisted the help of the Dutch National Child Exploitation Team. The international barriers in this investigation disappeared very quickly, noted Dutch detective Farid El Hamoudi. Everyone wanted the same thing, getting the responsible people behind bars. The NCET's white hat hackers made short work of the website's digital defenses. It was a welcome breakthrough, but what they found was nothing short of traumatizing. Peter's website accounted for one of the largest collections of exploitative images police have ever found, with hundreds of thousands of images accounting for thousands upon thousands of potential victims. Peter's own contributions were merely the tip of the iceberg,

but what police found most disturbing was the sheer demand for new content. The exact number of sales Peter made has never been made public, but the millions of dollars in cryptocurrency seized from his digital wallet gives us an idea of the sheer volume. When it came time to put Peter in handcuffs, an international dragnet ensured that he had no escape from the Philippines or its surrounding territories. Police eventually tracked Peter to Malaybalay City, where he was arrested on February 20th of 2015. His arrest and eventual conviction led to the apprehension of another Australian predator, 22-year-old Matthew Graham. Using the pseudonym Lux, Graham ran a number of what he referred to as Hurtcore sites on the dark web. These websites specialized in the

proliferation of particularly violent child exploitation videos, and at his trial, Graham disgusted those in attendance by claiming that he had acted in the name of freedom. At his own trial, Peter Scully faced a grand total of 75 criminal charges, with most of them pertaining to the trafficking and exploitation of children. He was tried along with two other men, a Brazilian named Ano Caetano de Alavera, and a German man named Christian Rusch, who were said to have played an intimate role in the recording and dissemination of Peter's crimes. Prosecutors were able to confirm that Peter and his evil companions created a video involving the torture and exploitation of an 18-month-old baby. Sections of the video were shown to the jury, who later described how

the girl had been hung upside down while the abuse took place. It should be noted that the footage was so graphic that several members of the jury sought psychological counseling in the aftermath of the trial, while prosecutors admitted to being traumatized at the trial's conclusion. They were the most devastating thing I'd ever seen, said Ruby Malinog. I cried when I was watching them. In fact, I feel like crying just now while talking about it. It was hard to believe what I was seeing, and hard to believe that somebody could do those things to children. One of the top figures in the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime

called the case the most horrific thing she'd ever had to deal with, with Peter's crimes being so severe that the Philippine government flirted with the idea of reintroducing the death penalty, which had previously been abolished less than 10 years prior. Northern Mindanao Chief Prosecutor Jamie Umpa was quoted as saying, If I had my choice, it would be death for Scully. I want it to happen. We have to send a strong message to others that if they come to the Philippines and torture and abuse our children in this way,

they will be investigated with the full force of law and executed. At one point during the trial, Peter Scully appeared to laugh and joke with his confidants, but when he was found guilty on one count of human trafficking and five counts of violating underage girls, he failed to see the funny side. The six counts were enough to secure a life sentence, but not all Peter's crimes had been accounted for. In November of 2022, Peter received a second conviction and was sentenced to an additional 129 years in prison. While his more repentant accomplice, Karma Alvarez, received life with the possibility of parole, Lazo Margallo Castaña was sentenced to 126 years in prison for being an active participant in the exploitation.

Two other accomplices, Alexander Lau and Maria Dorothea Chia, who were said to have played a lesser role in the exploitation ring, were sentenced to nine years apiece. Since his imprisonment, Peter has complained of the conditions in the prison he's being held at, claiming overcrowding and underfeeding has led to a rapid deterioration in his health. Jail warden Ferdinand Pontilio told the media that he wants to be pampered with luxury food and a mobile telephone so he can make international calls. He wants the same conditions as there are in Australian jails, but this is not Australia. Peter has refused to comment on the allegations, but it stands to reason that his lifelong home is severely overcrowded. Deval Prison and Penal Farm was built to house

no more than 350 prisoners, but as of November 2022, it was home to almost 2,000 inmates. Yet it's difficult to feel any sympathy for a man who showed such a despicable lack of mercy or empathy for those whose lives he succeeded in destroying, all for his own perverse financial gain. But perhaps the most terrifying aspect of Peter's case is that jailing him barely made a dent in the ongoing effort to rid the world of child exploitation. There are many, many more monsters like Peter, who lurk in the darkest, most forbidden corners of the dark web, dedicated to spreading the most heinous and unforgivable filth known to man. The only silver lining of such a dark, foreboding cloud is that for every evil, dark web predator,

there are a dozen equally dedicated law enforcement agents who want nothing more than to put them in handcuffs. Excuse me, why are you walking so close behind me? Well, you're a tall guy. You throw a decent shadow when I'm walking in it to keep out of this bright sun. It hurts my eyes. Okay, well, you know what? Spec Savers, you can get two pairs of glasses from $149.

And, oh, you'll like this. One can be a pair of prescription sunglasses. Sounds great. Where's the nearest store? Not far. Come on. Let's hurry then. To my count.

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Terms apply. See Pennzoil.ca slash offer for details. MasterCard is a trademark of MasterCard International Incorporated. Born on October 24th of 1988, Matthew Alexander Fowler grew up in an upper-middle-class family in the small English village of Knutsford and Cheshire. He later studied at King's Secondary School in nearby Macclesfield, where he apparently excelled in his studies before being accepted to study seismic oceanography at the University of Cambridge, Clara College. Following his attainment of a bachelor's degree, Matthew continued in academia, earning himself a master's and doctoral degree throughout his years of extended study. He then went on to become a

postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the University of Birmingham, and was a popular extroverted young man with a large and close-knit social circle. Friends described him as hilarious and larger than life, but Matthew was harboring a deep, dark secret of horrifying proportions. During his first or second year of university, Matthew shared a house with several other young students. It was the kind of accommodation the Americans might refer to as co-educational, where students are trusted to choose the most suitable housemates or one another regardless of gender. This is how Matthew ended up living with an unnamed young woman who spoke of his boisterous, sometimes edgy, sense of humor.

On one occasion, Matthew joked with the woman about secretly filming her while she used the home's shared bathroom. The suggestion was so ridiculously out of character for Matthew that the woman simply laughed it off and didn't take the suggestion seriously at all. But the truth was, Matthew really had been filming her while she'd been showering. It wasn't a joke. It was a soft admission and since it wasn't taken remotely seriously, it emboldened Matthew to continue such predatory behavior. And then, as the years went by, Matthew would crawl deeper and deeper into a web of digital depravity, resulting in one of the most harrowing criminal prosecutions in British judiciary history. Like many of his peers, Matthew spent a great deal of time using a computer for research, writing, and study.

But since Matthew was a purely dedicated researcher, he was glued to a keyboard for anything between 12 to 16 hours a day. Others might have found that staring at a screen for that long to be somewhat tedious, but Matthew didn't have a problem with it at all. He delighted in internet culture, as he had began to navigate its exploits and inner workings. Matthew began to familiarize himself with and inner workings. Matthew began to familiarize himself with what's referred to as TOR. TOR is actually an acronym standing for

The Onion Router, a variety of free open-source software that enables anonymous online browsing and communication. It directs internet traffic via a free worldwide network that consists of more than 7,000 relays, all maintained by dedicated volunteers. Tor protects a user's personal privacy by concealing their location and usage from anyone performing network surveillance or traffic analysis. But like any tool, it can be used for good, or it can be used for evil. The only deciding factor is the user's intent. And in Matthew's case, his intent was nothing short of evil. Matthew began using his newfound

anonymity to access violent child exploitation websites known as HurtCore sites. Under the usernames 666Devil and EvilMind, Matthew not only viewed some of the most graphically disturbing videos in existence, but he also downloaded and circulated them among other corners of the dark web. These videos didn't just include those which depicted the abuse of children, but also the torture and execution of adults, the elderly, and animals. Browsing websites such as Hurt to the Core and No Limits Fun was Matthew's idea of relaxing recreation after a hard day's research. But Matthew got his kicks in other ways too. At some point around the year 2009, Matthew began catfishing a series of unsuspecting internet users. At first, it was harmless fun, like contacting online sellers to demand outrageously low prices for their goods. Then it escalated to catfishing naive young people

and to showing up to remote places for dates that never happened. But instead of growing bored of such tomfoolery, Matthew continued to escalate the scope and scale of these catfishing incidents, and the longer he did it, the darker they became. It's believed that sometime in the early 2010s, Matthew came across an advertisement on the online marketplace Gumtree.com. It had been posted by a 14-year-old girl who wished to find herself some weekend babysitting work in order to earn some pocket money. Posing as a similarly aged art student named Liz, Matthew reached out to the unnamed girl, initiated conversation, and slowly began to win her trust.

Through the course of their conversations, Liz told the unnamed girl that she was drawing or painting a series of still-life images of human subjects. This is how Matthew slowly and methodically convinced the unnamed girl to send compromising pictures of herself, all under the impression that his motives were relatively innocent. Yet when she did so, the trap was sprung. Matthew revealed there was no Liz, and that if his teenage victim failed to comply with his every whim, the compromising photographs could be leaked online. He took his time on deciding what her first task would be, and when he finally emailed his demand to his still shell-shocked victim, she was beyond horrified. Matthew ordered the girl to take a photograph of herself licking a toilet seat at her secondary school. The task

would not only be extremely humiliating and unhygienic for his victim, but it would serve as a further blackmailing material, thus ensuring her continued compliance. The victim, who could not be named for legal reasons due to her age at the time of the offence, later gave an anonymous statement to the British media. I was ashamed, she said. Those pictures were awful and I didn't want any of my friends to think that I wanted to do that. But I also felt like no one would understand or believe me because there was no one there holding a knife to me and physically making me do it, even though that's what it felt like. Every single day for months on end,

Matthew would text the girl with increasingly perverse and dangerous demands. Every day when I woke up, there would be a message, she said. When I came home from school, there would be a message. Even when we weren't talking, I was anxious because I was just waiting for the next message to come through. The stress of the ordeal had a devastating effect on the girl's studies and relationships. She stopped talking to her family. She stopped going outside. Every waking moment was spent trying to appease Matthew's will to prevent the pictures from being leaked. Eventually, as the girl approached the precipice of a complete nervous breakdown, she begged Matthew to leave her alone and confessed to wanting to take her own life. In a sort of abuse journal he kept on one of his favorite Hurtcore websites, Matthew wrote

extensively of the torment he inflicted. He boasted of trapping the 14-year-old into a web of blackmail and humiliation, claiming his intention was to mentally F her up and that he didn't care if she lived or died. Other journal entries included a list entitled A Hundred Things We Want to See at Least Once. Two of the bullet points included were a young girl being used as a dartboard, and a video depicting a child's bones being slowly and deliberately broken. When the unnamed girl brought up the topic of taking her own life, Matthew actually encouraged her to do it,

claiming that he'd already uploaded pictures of her to hardcore websites on the dark web. If she took her own life, those same pictures would find their way into the inboxes of her family, friends, and teachers. It's not clear when or how the unnamed girl managed to evade Matthew, but we know that in at least one case, Matthew made good on his threats and sent compromising photographs of the girl to her own parents. It's more than likely that it's the same anonymous girl who gave interviews in the aftermath of her ordeal, as at one point, she's quoted as saying, I don't talk to my family anymore at all. I guess for me, I felt like they wouldn't understand.

Then when I finally told them, they didn't. They basically said it was my fault and that's how the relationship broke down. Having completed the cycle of manipulation, blackmail, and abuse, Matthew simply moved on to another victim and the contemporary internet proved rich pickings for such a devious predator. Using a series of 70 different carefully crafted fake personas, Matthew's hardcore blackmail operation continued for many years and with many separate victims. The identities of most of these victims has remained a closely guarded secret, but using a breakdown of the charges levied against him, we can put together a rather detailed picture

of what Matthew forced them to do. Some of these charges are simply too obscene for even a hardened true crime channel such as this one, but of the more interesting and less obscene charges there was, and I quote, forced compulsory labor. This meant that Matthew had blackmailed one of his victims into performing petty chores for him, essentially rendering them a modern-day chattel slave. Matthew was also charged with three counts of participating in the activities of an organized crime group, meaning there's a good chance Matthew shared evidence of his crimes with a large online network of predators. But it wasn't just indecent images that Matthew shared. The UK's Crown

Prosecution Service later charged Matthew with two counts of possession of a predator manual. One is believed to have simply been downloaded by Matthew and was written by another source, whereas the second such manual was almost certainly composed by Matthew himself and detailed exactly how he was able to blackmail so many different people from many different walks of life, all at the same time. This manual was almost certainly found and downloaded by another British predator, a 36-year-old Norfolk man by the name of David Wilson, who admitted to 96 offenses related to child exploitation in early 2021.

It seems the investigation into Matthew's online activities began sometime in 2013, and over the course of the next four years, Britain's National Crime Agency would be joined by none other than MI6, US Homeland Security, and the Australian Federal Police. The scope and scale of Matthew's offenses was so awful that even an unnamed Israeli intelligence agency became involved in the operation, who named him as one of the most prolific and dangerous cybercriminals in the entire world. In the beginning, William Kerr of the British NCA complained that tech companies displayed less than ideal cooperation during their inquiry into Matthew's identity. He said they had to be shown images of underage girls eating their own feces before they took the investigation seriously. Despite not specifically naming any one company, Kerr also claimed their lack of cooperation allowed Matthew to continue offending for

much longer than if they fully cooperated with their investigation. But regardless, after a long and thorough investigation into his online activities, including an undercover officer filming him using a tiny button camera, police officers apprehended Matthew at his place of work and he was arrested on June 21st of 2017. After his initial hearing on October 16th of that same year, Matthew pled guilty to a jaw-dropping 137 separate offenses against 46 separate victims. Four months later, he was sentenced to 32 years in prison with an additional six years parole following his eventual release. Judge Philip Parker described Matthew as warped and sadistic, and that his behavior was cunning, persistent, manipulative, and cruel,

and that he quite clearly reveled in the pain and anguish he caused. Ruana Igoyovwe, a senior specialist prosecutor for the UK's Crown Prosecution Service, was quoted as saying that Matthew Falder is a highly manipulative individual who clearly enjoyed humiliating his many victims and the impact of his offending in this case has been significant. He deliberately targeted young and vulnerable victims. At least three victims are known to have attempted to take their own lives

and some others have inflicted self-harm. There was a high degree of sophistication and significant planning by Fowler due to his use of encryption software and technology and his electronic communication and the use of multiple fake online identities and encrypted email addresses. Matt Sutton, a National Crime Agency officer who also worked on the case, added that, In more than 30 years of law enforcement, I've never come across an offender whose sole motivation was to inflict such profound anguish and pain. Matthew Falder reveled in it. I've also never known such an extremely complex investigation with an offender who was technologically savvy and able to stay hidden in the darkest recesses of the dark web.

This investigation represents a watershed moment. Falter is not alone, so we will continue to develop and deliver our capabilities nationally for the whole law enforcement system to stop offenders like him from wrecking innocent lives. I commend the victims for their bravery and I urge anyone who is being abused online to report it. There is help available. In the immediate aftermath of his sentence, Matthew and his attorney lodged an appeal, claiming that 32 years in prison was far too harsh a punishment for someone who never physically hurt any of his victims. Shockingly, the following year saw his sentence reduced from 32 to 25 years, with an additional eight years on license.

When news of the reduction hit the headlines, it caused a great deal of public outcry, but Matthews' parole board was quick to add that if he still posed a threat to children at the 25-year mark, he would be forced to serve the full 32 years before being released. In early 2018, Cambridge University stated that they were actively pursuing methods of stripping Matthew of his academic qualifications, at the time when there was no precedent of a removal process for its alumni, and with a lack of follow-up story, it's reasonable to assume Matthew's degree has not been taken away from him. But even if everything was stripped away, it still doesn't erase his crimes and it still doesn't undo the suffering Matthew wrought.

The sweetest justice Matthew's victims could ever receive is if governments around the world make a commitment to finding and erasing caches of online child exploitation content. Some say it's impossible, that once something is online, it's always online, but that simply isn't good enough. Long ago, the bandits of the western frontier were brought to heel by the hard work of good brave men, and unless humanity finds the courage and resolve to finally deal with such an insidious threat, predators like Matthew will always have somewhere to turn to, to feed the lesser angels of their nature. Sometimes I just think I have bad luck. I'm almost 30 years old and I can't seem to find myself a nice partner to settle down with.

I've gone on a million dates, I've tried the whole Tinder thing, and I even had friends set me up on blind dates, and I just can't seem to find that special connection with anyone, no matter how hard I try. The story I'm about to tell you happened to me a few years ago, and I don't know if it was just desperation or just plain bad luck, but it still haunts me to this day. It started on a beautiful summer day. I happened to be off from work on a Saturday, which never happens, and I decided to try and make the most of it. I had recently moved to a new neighborhood a few months prior to the events of this story and was excited to see that my neighbor was having a bunch of yard sales.

Because I usually worked on Saturdays, I always tend to miss the yard sales, so the fact that I could actually check them out on this specific Saturday, I was thrilled. I hit a few houses on my street that weren't really selling anything worthwhile. As I continued to make my way through the neighborhood, I found a couple of little treasures. One house that I stopped at was selling a bunch of guitars and drum sets. Since I play guitar, I was interested right away. I grabbed this lime green acoustic guitar the guy was selling and while I was inspecting the instrument, I heard this voice behind me say, hey, sweet guitar, you play? I turned around and said yes at the same time. What I didn't expect to see was a beautiful

woman smiling at me, and she was completely my type. She was dressed in a punk rock style, covered in tattoos, and most notably, she had green hair. I'm not one to engage with people so easily, but she had a certain charm about her that I was sucked right into her gaze. We ended up making small talk for nearly half an hour at this poor guy's yard sale, and finally the guy said that I had to either buy the guitar or leave since I had been holding it the entire time me and this girl had been talking. I told her it was nice meeting her and then went and paid the guy. I remember walking home with the guitar in my hand, kind of beating myself up that I didn't get her number. I didn't even get her name. Then I remember feeling this rush of joy because from several feet behind me, I heard her voice.

She was asking me to stop and when I did, she ran over and grabbed my hand and said, I know this sounds crazy, but I really like talking to you. We had a connection, you know, and I think it would be crazy if we both ignored it. Would you maybe want to hang out? I was so excited, but I was trying to play it cool. I remember laughing and telling her my name, to which she replied with hers. She said her name was Moon. Yes, it was Moon. And we joked and continued our small talk again for another few minutes. I eventually worked up the courage to ask her out for a drink and I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when she said yes. We went to a local bar, shared a few drinks, and then one thing led to another and I asked her to come back to my place and again she went with it.

We had an amazing night. We stayed up for a while, playing Mario Party and then ended the night on a high note. I went to bed in probably one of the best moods I had ever been in. That quickly changed when I woke up at around four in the morning. I noticed that she wasn't lying next to me anymore. I sat up in bed and noticed that my bedroom door was shut, which I never shut my door. I snuck over to the door and opened it slowly and I thought that I could hear the sound of breaking glass coming from downstairs. I was still groggy from waking up so I wasn't moving too fast. As I was going down the stairs I shouted Moon's name. And before I went all the way downstairs, I heard her yell something under her breath and then heard the back door

slam. I finally started to move with some pace and that's when I noticed that I was too late. My kitchen was completely destroyed. There was glass everywhere. I started to freak out and then my anger turned to sadness. This woman had not only trashed my kitchen but she also robbed me blind. All my records were gone and two of my guitars were gone as well. I had a china cabinet that had a bunch of my family heirlooms and all of that was gone. She had taken everything that I had of real value and I ran out the back door trying to find her. My logic was telling me that there was no way that she could have carried all that stuff out but when I got outside she was nowhere to be found. And reality started to set in and I realized how hard I had been played.

Clearly this woman had a plan all along and she had to have someone else with her because she would never have been able to get away so fast. I obviously reported this incident to the police but there was nothing that ever came of it. I could describe her appearance but nobody matching her description was ever caught. Moon must have just been some fake name because nobody in the area had the name Moon And when I reflect on this now, years later, I can notice some red flags Like where did she come from that day? I never bothered to ask

She didn't drive a car, so I guess I assumed she lived in the neighborhood She was dependent on me the entire evening And instead of looking at this as some type of issue I was more into the idea that she needed me. I never did get my stuff back, and now I'm ever more careful and selective with whom I bring into my home. And be careful, because sometimes the people we're closest with, the people we trust, can be the monsters that are right under our noses the entire time. Checking off your to-do list? Here's an easy one from Pennzoil. Get up to a $30 MasterCard prepaid virtual card with the purchase of 10 liters of Pennzoil Ultra Platinum at Canadian Tire.

Maximizing engine protection and getting a reward for it? That's two checks on your list. Pennzoil. Long may we drive. Offer ends 8-31-25. Valid at participating locations only. Valid email address required. Terms apply. See Pennzowell.ca slash offer for details. MasterCard is a trademark of MasterCard International Incorporated. On a warm, sunny day back in July of 2018,

18-year-old Alexis Stern of Big Lake, Minnesota, was sitting behind the wheel of her brand new cherry red Ford Fusion. It was a gift from her parents, earned by passing a recent driving exam, and in the passenger seat sat her boyfriend of just a few months, Robbie Olson. The young couple were in high spirits, enjoying their newfound freedom and soaking up the summer, but just after stopping for a bite to eat, Alexis' phone began to buzz. She checked the caller ID, only to see that it read caller unknown, so out of pure curiosity, she answered the phone. The caller introduced himself as a deputy from the Sherbourne County Sheriff's Department, and to Alexis' shock,

he asked her to report to the Sheriff's Office as soon as she was physically able. Alexis began to panic and asked the officer what kind of trouble she was in. The officer assured her that she'd done nothing wrong, but that she still needed to get over to the Sheriff's Office as quickly and safely as possible. Alexis drove over to the department's HQ immediately and upon her arrival, she was rushed into an interview room by officers who moved with a frightening sense of urgency. Alexis had no idea what might have caused such a reaction and for a while, she insisted it all had to be some kind of wild mistake. But there had been no mistake, and when the deputies explained

what was happening, her head spun with disbelief. One of the deputies sat Alexis down and, in the most delicate of terms, told her of a frighteningly credible threat to her life. When a horrified Alexis asked who was trying to kill her, she discovered the deputies had no idea, hence why she'd been rushed to the department with such urgency. The only thing they knew was that whoever wanted her dead had hired a contract killer from a dark web black marketplace known as Kimora Hitman. Just a few weeks prior to that faithful phone call, a user named Mastermind365 logged onto the Kimura Hitman website using a variety of encryptors known as a Tor browser. There, they sent the site's administrators a message asking if it was possible to purchase a kidnapping

as opposed to a murder. The admin replied it was indeed possible, but given the additional risks associated with keeping the victim alive, the cost would be considerably higher. Mastermind365 took a few days to reply, but when they did, they seemed to have changed their minds. They wanted their target to be shot, execution style, giving them no chance of survival whatsoever. The user then sent just over 5,000 US dollars in Bitcoin to the organization's cryptocurrency wallet, along with a single digital photograph of Alexis Stern. That evening, Alexis drove back home under police escort. She was told the hit had only just been called in, meaning that she had at least a week or two before the hitman made a move. A professional would most likely take the time to case her house, track her movements, preparing and perfecting their plan while waiting for the optimal time to strike.

But now that she was forewarned, Alexis also had time to prepare. Her parents installed a sophisticated home security system before purchasing a canister of military-grade pepper spray. She also signed up to MMA classes, and when her boyfriend heard of the threat, he bought a very large and very sharp variety of fishing knife just in case the pepper spray failed. Due to the high-priority nature of the assassination threat, the small-town deputies of Big Lake soon found themselves joined by federal agents from a number of different three-letter government agencies. The deputies would still be doing the legwork, but the feds were now running the show. When asked if there was anyone she'd angered or annoyed over the previous few months, Alexis seemed clueless. But then, investigators watched as something quite clearly dawned on her.

Alexis then told them that sometime prior she'd broken off an online relationship with a young British man named Adrian Fry. Adrian seemed to have accepted her decision, but also seemed to have handled it very, very poorly. Yet no matter how heartbroken he was, Alexis refused to accept that he might have attempted to purchase her death. Adrian was this sensitive soul who would faint at the sight of blood, she said. He didn't even like violent movies, said they were too intense and gruesome for him. Federal agents made a note of the man's name and then assured Alexis that they'd be in touch. But over the next several days, Alexis' physical and mental health began to suffer. I was just constantly looking over my shoulder, keeping an eye on anyone that seemed to notice me,

checking behind cars and under them, she said. You don't know what you're looking for. At this point, it's worth asking how a small town sheriff's department came to learn of such an assassination plot. We might naturally assume it was the Department of Homeland Security that reached out to warn them, failing that, the FBI, or perhaps the CIA. But the truth is, there's only one person Alexis Stern has to thank for the advanced warning, and that person is Chris Montero. Chris is mentioned in another of this video's stories, the kidnapping of Chloe Ayling,

as having debunked the Black Deaths Group's claims of being a powerful international human trafficking group. But that isn't Chris' only piece of stellar investigation. As we know, Chris spends a great deal of time acting as what's known as a white hat hacker and often reports on what he finds during his in-depth investigations of dark web cybercrime. He routinely surfs the seedier corners of the web behind the web, and one night he came across a website called Bessa Mafia. The Bessa Mafia claimed to offer the services of professional, often ex-military killers in return for large sums of Bitcoin.

But murder was not the only service they offered. For the right price, a visitor could arrange for almost anyone to be beaten, tortured, kidnapped, or violated. The only variable factor was how long the job would take to complete. Bessa Mafia's website was only slightly more polished than some of the other dark web murder-for-hire sites he'd stumbled across. But much like the others, he assumed it was nothing but a fake. Some were merely poorly coded jokes among college-aged computer science nerds, while others had been straight-up scams

designed to siphon money from the bitter and gullible. Regardless, Chris wrote a brief blog post about the site, calling it out as an elaborate fraud, and then turned into bed for the night. The following morning, Chris woke up to an unusual-looking unread email in his inbox. The author referred to themselves as Yura and claimed to be the Bessa Mafia site administrator. Then, bizarrely, instead of threatening or attempting to intimidate Chris, Yura offered him around $1,000 in Bitcoin to delete his critical blog post. Assuming the offer to be fraudulent, Chris refused, but then a few days later, another email appeared in his inbox. Despite being from a different email address, the author once again claimed to be Jura, but the message contained a link to a YouTube video.

Curious, Chris clicked the link and was redirected to a video of an old car sitting on what appeared to be a derelict lot. A masked and hooded figure then approached the car, doused it in gasoline, then set it alight. And then after doing so, the hooded figure approached the camera and held a small handwritten note in front of the lens. Dedication to Pirate London, it said. Pirate London is a reference to Chris Montero's cybercrime blog, known as Pirate.London, and although that was a relatively simple connection to make, Chris admitted to being rather shaken. In retribution, Chris then dedicated himself to getting Bessa Mafia shut down. He was soon successful, but was deeply unsettled when he discovered a brand new site up and running just days after the first had been erased.

Chris once again focused his efforts and the second incarnation of Vesa Mafia was shut down too. But instead of giving up, Yura diversified. He created two websites, and then three, and before long, murder-for-hire sites were popping up faster than Chris could take them down. Their only weakness was that they all operated via the same system. On each of Yura's websites, users were first asked to set up an entirely anonymous account, with the only rule being it had to be attached to a functioning cryptocurrency wallet. Users then could select from a drop-down menu of violent delights, each of which came with various customization and pricing options. Once selected,

the user was then asked to upload the address of their intended victim, as well as a recent photograph for the purposes of identification. After that, they were simply asked to wait until their transaction could be dealt with. Bizarrely, Yura's websites operated much like any other online business. There was a recruitment section where wannabe hitmen could be sent over a short resume in the hopes of finding employment, but there was also an FAQ section where customers could find the answers to common questions and queries. One frequently asked question says, Yura, do you kill women? And the reply is chilling. Of course, Yura states, but some of our contractors might refuse so please understand if there are delays in the

fulfillment of your request. Such a layout might give the website an air of surreal and, in turn, it's easy to dismiss Yura's work as an elaborate scam or even a compelling fiction. To this day, it's not confirmed if Yura really is some shadowy master assassin, but the people who seek to patronize his services are very real indeed. In February of 2016, another user logged onto the Bessa Mafia website under the username DogDayGod. After loading up their cryptocurrency wallet with more than $6,000, the user ordered the death of a middle-aged woman from Cottage Grove, Minnesota. The note on the request simply said, I need her dead. The target was a dog trainer named Amy Allwine, and in a follow-up message,

Dog Day God fed Yura as much information about her as they could. This included details of her employment, where her son went to school, and the daily habits of her IT worker husband, Stephen Allwine. Yura claimed that he could make it look like an accident, perhaps a hit and run, or a freak fire, but on the proposed day of reckoning, nothing happened. Day Dog God sent what amounted to a letter of complaint to Yura, asking why he and his men kept failing. I do not care about date or method, they wrote. You have her picture and address, so you can tail her or do whatever you need to do to get this job done.

I ask that you only get her and not the dad or kid as the kid is a friend of our child's and I do not want to leave him orphaned. A few months later, another white hat hacker broke into one of Euro's websites and then forwarded every scrap of harvested data directly to the FBI. One of them was Amy Allwine. FBI agents rushed to the Allwine residence to warn Amy of the imminent danger and left with assurances that security would be tightened. Much like the Stern family, Stephen Allwine made sure to have a sophisticated,

cutting-edge security system installed in his home. And on top of that, he bought himself a handgun and then learned how to use it. Amy must have felt like she was in good hands. Her husband had spent a hell of a lot of money to ensure her protection, and although purchasing a firearm was rather out of character for him, it was touching that he'd do whatever it took to keep her safe. With that in mind, we can only imagine Amy's surprise when just a few months later, her loving husband walked right up to her, took out the gun he'd learned to operate so

deftly, and shot her in the head with it. For years, Stephen Allwine had been arranging extramarital affairs using a website called Ashley Madison. He desperately wanted a divorce, but as an elder in the Midwest-based United Church of God, that simply wasn't an option for him. So, after taking out a $700,000 life insurance policy on her, Stephen created an account on a website that claimed to offer the services of contract killers, and the name he chose was Dog Day God. Stephen and Yura's chat logs would become a piece of key evidence during the investigation into Amy's death. After shooting her in the head, Stephen had tried to make his

wife's death look like she had taken her own life. The chat logs proved it was not. In January 2018, he was convicted of first-degree murder and then sentenced to life in prison. But the conviction did not come easy. It has since emerged that America's FBI has refused to accept tips from British or European hackers and redirects them to their own national crime agencies, some of which refuse to deal with evidence obtained using so-called illegal methods. It also emerged that in February of 2017, Chris Montero had his apartment raided by heavily armed police, before being arrested on suspicion of being the head of the Besa Mafia.

Apparently, as an act of subterfuge turned petty revenge, Yura had rather subtly suggested that his real name was Chris M, and that he was employed as a systems administrator at a London-based IT firm. This was picked up by white hat hackers who matched the information to Chris' real-life persona. Then before he knew it, he was being dragged away in handcuffs. It took two nights in a prison cell before police realized their mistake, but the damage had already been done. Yura had shown what he was capable of. In the weeks following Alexis' warning, she heard next to nothing from the FBI or local law enforcement. They had promised additional patrols in and around her neighborhood, but Alexis had seen very little uptick in police activity. She had no idea how she was going to keep herself

safe, but what she did have was a lot of spare time on her hands. Out of a combination of fear and stress, Alexis dropped out of community college then quit her job at the local movie theater. I couldn't be left alone. I couldn't drive by myself. I had all my freedom taken away, she said. The only place I felt safe was with my boyfriend, Robbie, at his place over in Monticello. In the hours upon hours of downtime that she was faced with, Alexis started to doubt her original belief that her ex-boyfriend was incapable of hurting. Adrian was older than she was and earned good money as an accountant. He seemed mature and with plenty to live for, but he was also the only person she could think of who'd been upset with her that also had access to thousands upon thousands of dollars. In March 2018, Adrienne had flown over from the UK to visit Alexis in her native Minnesota. The trip started well, but over the course of the next

seven days, Adrienne proved to be pushy, moody, and emotionally manipulative. When Alexis suggested they go out with her friends, Adrienne declined and, after a number of derisive comments, became angry when Alexis decided to go alone. What's more, Alexis' mother and father had been kind enough to give Adrian a bed for the week, yet he showed no appreciation whatsoever and treated them with a vague disinterest. At the end of the week, Alexis decided she had enough, and after accompanying Adrian to the airport for his departing flight, she told him she wanted to break up. I said very clearly that I didn't want to be with him, and he tried telling me that I wasn't thinking right, and I was making a mistake. He kept pushing it onto me and guilt tripping me, saying he wouldn't find anyone else. It was deeply manipulative. In the end, it was hard evidence that changed Alexis' mind.

Mastermind 365 had a distinct habit of writing thank you as all one word, something which seems particular to British English as opposed to American English. Secondly, Mastermind 365 attempted to use the dark web to purchase an illegal firearm, something they'd be able to do with perfect legality if they were a citizen of the United States. But third, and perhaps the most damning factor of all, is that Mastermind 365 changed their mind about kidnapping to settle on murder on the exact day that Alexis Stern told Adrian about her new boyfriend. The evidence reads like something out of an episode of Columbo, all tied up in a neat shiny bow. But shockingly, no charges have ever been brought against Adrian

Fry or the administrators of the Besa Mafia websites. One might assume that's because these websites are fakes, guilty of other cybercrimes perhaps, but not conspiracy to murder. Yet you'd be mistaken, because as much as there's a sizable amount of proof that many murder-for-hire sites are fraudulent, there's even more evidence to suggest that many of them are very real. In June 2018, 21-year-old Private First Class Brian Narroje was found dead on a rural baseball field in Clark County, Indiana. Since the cause of death was a single gunshot wound to the head and the weapon was found at the scene of the crime, local sheriff's deputies quickly concluded that Private First Class Naroje's death was him taking his own life. There was just one problem. Private First Class

Naroje's name was on one of the kill lists connected to Yura's websites. Just weeks before his death, a user named Toonbib had offered Yura $6,500 in Bitcoin in exchange for Nirohe's death. However, this meant that Yura and his organization are directly responsible for the young soldier's death, as the person who wanted him dead could have hedged their bets, so to speak, and offered cash to a series of different contract killers, both online and offline, to ensure the job was done. It was also discovered that not long before his death, private first class Naroje named a female companion as the sole beneficiary of his life insurance policy. For legal reasons, this female friend has never been named publicly,

but Naroje's father has since openly questioned whether his son's death truly was him taking his own life, or if there's some other, much more sinister explanation. Dark web assassinations have also occurred on the opposite side of the globe. On March 12th of 2019, two Russian teenagers were arrested following the murder of a prominent Moscow-based police officer known for his aggressive pursuit of narcotics traffickers. Much like Private First Class Naro's case, the murder of the Moscow police officer was never directly linked to any of Yura's webpages. But according to the Russian journalist responsible for breaking the story, the killers were paid anonymously in Bitcoin and never once met the

person who posted the job. This last case in particular has no ambiguity about it. Whoever paid for the hit might well remain anonymous, but the evidence is undeniable. There are indeed online services which offer a menu of murder, kidnap, and brutal assault. And if law enforcement has as hard a time taking them down as other dark webbed dens of iniquity, they'll be around for a long, that happened to me last year. At the moment I wasn't so scared, but as I told people the story afterward is when I started to realize how scary and horrific this encounter could have been. One thing my wife and I love to do is hit up garage sales to try to find awesome stuff for cheap. I'm the king of bargains and I often can't pass them up.

I'm left handed and one time I got a brand new set of left handed golf clubs for 30 bucks because the guy was having surgery and wasn't going to be able to golf anymore. And that's the type of deals I hunt for. Well, last year in the middle of the summer while my wife and I were garage sale hunting, I found what I thought was an estate sale. A fairly large house in my neighborhood was selling just about everything you can think of from the house. The couple running the sale was probably in their mid-thirties if I had to guess. I got talking to the guy and I found out that it wasn't an estate sale technically, but there was just about everything being sold in that house at that time. The house belonged to the guy's father, who was still alive and sitting in

a chair next to the garage. The man explained to us that his father was losing it mentally and that he was going to be living with him. They planned on keeping the house but wanted to get rid of most of the stuff inside so they could renovate it and then have a house they could rent out. Most of the stuff in the garage was just junk. Years worth of clutter that old people tend to accumulate. Then I saw something that caught my eye. It was a really cool military sword. It was engraved with all sorts of writing, had an eagle for the handle,

and to cap it off, it looked like it was solid gold. Whether it was or wasn't real gold, I didn't know at the time. I grabbed the sword and asked the man if this was truly for sale and the guy shrugged it off and said yeah I'll sell it to you for 25 bucks. I gave him 30 and walked away with my new shiny toy. As I was walking to my car with my wife I happened to look up and see the old man was now standing up. He looked concerned and almost angry. As I was driving away I saw the old man walk over to his son and he appeared to be yelling at him. The son just kept putting his hands up in the air while the old guy was yelling. I was curious as to what they were fighting about, but ultimately I just forgot about it in minutes.

That night when we got home, we were sitting in the backyard, grilling some steaks. I was telling a couple of neighbors that came over about the sword and it was only a matter of time until I went inside and grabbed it so I could show it off to my buddies. The night continued and we ate our steaks outside and continued hanging out and enjoying the evening. Around 8pm that night, one of my friends said that he thought that he had heard someone knocking on my front door. I didn't put any stock into that because we were out back and I figured that there was no way that my friend could have heard that. Not five minutes later I heard my wife scream at the top of her lungs. We all turned around and storming into my backyard

was the old man from the garage sale. He wasn't limping or moving sluggishly. He came back there like a bat out of hell and was making a shot for the sword which was next to the table on the patio. I started to approach the man calmly, telling him to just hold on and relax and he didn't listen to me at all. He grabbed the sword and I kid you not, he took a swing. Thankfully he's older and a weaker man so I was able to just move out of the way but the man was screaming erratically and claiming that I stole his sword. For some reason I was still trying to plead with the guy even though he was trying to stab me. I finally had enough and tackled this guy to the ground.

I tried to do it gently because I was scared I was going to break the guy in half or something. I was trying to figure out in my head how this guy knew where I lived and I had no idea. My wife called the police who showed up pretty quickly and right away the old man started telling them that I stole his sword. I was able to calmly explain to the police that I had bought it at a garage sale and that they could contact the man that I bought it from. It took a while, but the son was finally notified and he came rushing over. He must have apologized a million times, and I didn't press charges, the old man clearly wasn't there mentally. Perhaps the most terrifying part was when me, the son, and the cop were talking, the old man snuck over and grabbed the sword.

My wife just happened to see him grab it and she pointed it out right away. I still think to myself, what would that man have done if my wife didn't see him pick up the sword? Would he have tried to use it again? I exchanged numbers with the son just in case I had to reach out to him again and I became more vigilant of all my locks in the house. I never did give the sword back, and my conscience sort of eats at me for that one. Now in hindsight I should have just given the sword back and just bought it from the son when the old man died, but I was thinking in the moment. And as of writing this I still don't know if the man is alive. The only thing I can say for sure is that since that

horrible evening in the backyard, I have yet to see that some men are just creeps, but honestly some people in general are just creeps as well. When my husband was out of town for his job, I decided to have a garage sale with my mom and two sisters. We all lived relatively close, so we just had the yard sale at my mom and two sisters. We all lived relatively close so we just had the yard sale at my house since I had a really big front yard. None of us were selling anything that was really that exciting, just a bunch of extra stuff that we had all collected over the years. About an hour into the sale a normal looking guy approached me and didn't have anything in his hands to buy. I asked if I could help him, to which he replied in this sort of calm voice, saying, no. The interaction was weird, but seemed harmless. I dismissed it somehow, I can't remember exactly what I said, and walked away. Not two minutes later, the man approached

me again. I had my back turned to him, but I could feel him walking up behind me. Instead of turning and saying anything, the man said, Hello dear, you have the most amazing eyes. I turned and gave the guy this half smile as I thanked him and I continued to walk around just trying to distance myself from this creep. I sort of felt bad for a minute because what if this guy was just genuinely trying to be nice and I was being as cold as can be. When he approached me the third time, he had some shirts or something in his hands, and he says, I'm sorry I was so blunt earlier, I hope I didn't offend you. I smiled and apologized for my cold demeanor, and I told him that it was alright and that I didn't mind the compliment. That was my mistake.

I gave the guy an inch and he took a mile and he immediately said, oh okay good, well we should go out sometime. I was pretty floored by the statement and I told him that I was married and I wasn't interested. He then started to beg me, saying things like, forget about your husband, I'm a real man, and my personal favorite, what even is marriage, it's just a fancy word. Now I was angry and annoyed, and I told the man that he needed to leave right now. He got angry and upset and tried to play this victim card, but he left after a minute or two.

About an hour later, a pretty woman came up to me with a huge smile on her face saying, hello dear, you have the most amazing eyes. I looked at her with a little disgust because she said exactly what the other guy said no more than an hour earlier. I thanked her and after an awkward pause I asked if she needed any help and she just continued to look at me and said, You really are beautiful. I think you should forget about your husband and let me and Zachary come over. Well this told me two things right away. One, this woman was with the creep from earlier.

And two, that creep's name is Zach. I won't write exactly what I said but let's just say that I said some not-so-nice words to the woman. She left and the rest of the afternoon went by with no issues. I felt like I was looking over my shoulder every two seconds, though. Every time someone cleared their throat or something like that, I thought Zachary or his female companion were behind me. My sisters and I cleaned everything up and I ended up going to one of my sister's houses for dinner. I had a bad feeling and I just felt more comfortable with being with them since my husband wasn't home. We ended up having a

classic night together, a night we sisters hadn't shared in a long time. We drank a bottle of wine, or maybe two, I can't remember, and just laughed all night long. At around midnight, my sister asked her husband to drive me home since he hadn't drank anything, and I wasn't in the right mind to drive my own car. The drive was only about three minutes from driveway to driveway, and if we had left thirty seconds later, my night may have ended much differently. As we were driving down the road, my brother-in-law said, what? Is someone home at your house? I sat up in my seat and noticed that the garage door was open. Not the overhead door,

but the normal one. The garage had a normal door that I kept locked 99% of the time. He pulled to the bottom of the driveway but told me not to get out yet. We couldn't have been sitting for more than 10 seconds when all of a sudden a light on the inside of the house turned on. The bright light in the living room was illuminating the front of the house. I didn't take any chances. I immediately called the police and my brother-in-law stayed right with me until they showed up. It took about five minutes for them to show up and during that time, we watched these intruders turn on every single light in the house.

When the cops finally did come, they must have seen the flashing lights because they ran out of the garage door as fast as they could. Two officers chased them and another officer came over to talk to me. A few minutes passed and the cops came back and they were unsuccessful in their foot chase. When they ran out of the house, it was easy to see that the two intruders were the woman from earlier and that creep as well. I told the cops everything I could think of with their descriptions. I went inside with my brother-in-law and they didn't take anything. All they did was smash our wedding picture and that was it. Everything else seemed untouched which made this all the more confusing.

I had no idea who these people were or what they wanted from me. I slept in my sister's house until my husband came home from his trip and the next day I installed several cameras around the house. Thankfully, those two never came back and I truly hope that whatever they wanted that evening remains a mystery for the foreseeable future. Checking off your to-do list? Here's an easy one from Pennzoil. Get up to a $30 MasterCard prepaid virtual card with the purchase of 10 liters of Pennzoil Ultra Platinum at Canadian Tire. Maximizing engine protection and getting a reward for it? That's two checks on your list. Pennzoil. Long may we drive. Offer ends 8-31-25. Valid at participating locations only.

Valid email address required. Terms apply. See pennzoil.ca slash offer for details. MasterCard is a trademark of MasterCard International Incorporated. So this just happened to me a few weeks ago, and I still can't really believe it. It just seems surreal to me that some people out there are just plain evil, and there really isn't any rhyme or reason for their actions. As I said, this was only a few weeks ago, and my family and I had a yard sale to kind of purge away a lot of the unnecessary clutter and just stuff we don't need anymore. For the most part, everything was fine. A couple of minor hiccups, but nothing

really crazy. At some point during the day, I noticed a strange older man. The guy was at least in his 60s and honestly honestly he was probably much older. He was browsing the yard sale like everyone else but I noticed him right away. He stuck out like a sore thumb. He was bald on top but had this wild white hair that shot out on each side. To give you a real mental image he kind of looked like Albert Einstein except he was really dirty looking. I try not to judge a book by its cover, but something was just off about this guy. After a few minutes of browsing, but not particularly looking at anything, I started to keep my eye on him, and that's when I noticed his weird behavior.

It became clear to me that he wasn't looking at anything and he was actually looking at my house. He looked down at something that I had on the table and then slowly he would just look up and examine my house again. At first I thought it was a coincidence but then I noticed it again and again. I tried not to let my imagination run wild but it was really hard to ignore. Things started getting busy and I lost my focus on the guy for a few minutes. When I finally regained my focus and located this dude, he was near my front bar window and he appeared to be looking inside. I decided that this was enough and I confronted him.

I told him that he was too close to my house and that he needed to leave if he wasn't going to buy anything. He just looked at me with this really unsettling blank expression and then he turned around and walked away. He left my yard sale and walked down the street but he ended up standing at the end of the street for several minutes. I would regularly look up and when I did, the strange man was still standing there. Finally, after I don't know how long, I didn't see him anymore. I eventually forgot about him and the rest of the day continued with no issues. That night, I was telling my girlfriend about the weird guy and she jumped up right away and claimed that she knew exactly who I was talking about. She told me that she had noticed him too and that

he was creeping her out, which isn't surprising. She told me that when she helped an older woman bring a chair to her car, when she was walking back, she saw him walking on the side of the house. She was confused at that moment but forgot about it not long after. She just assumed that he was lost and kind of wandering. She didn't think it was harmful in any way, as weird as it was, and we talked a little more that night and decided to go to bed. I ended up double checking all of the locks one last time before bed, just in case. At two in the morning, my girlfriend and I were both jolted awake by the same noise. It was the sound of a loud bang followed by screaming, and it sounded like it was right outside her window. She clenched the blanket

as I got up to look out the window. I saw my neighbor chasing someone down the street with what appeared to be something in their hand, probably a baseball bat, and my neighbor was screaming and the memory of him screaming to call 911 is still burned into my head. I ran outside to make sure that he was alright and by the time I got there, he was already walking back, huffing and puffing. A minute or two after he walked back over, the cops pulled up. My neighbor called them over and I was standing next to my neighbor. I thought I was being supportive of my neighbor at the time, but little did I know that he was going to drop the ultimate nightmare on me. I thought that my neighbor had caught some

type of potential intruder, but what he said was much worse. My neighbor was talking to the officer and he says, I was sitting in my garage smoking a cigarette and then I noticed the floodlight across the street turn on. Being nosy, I looked up and I saw a man trying to break into that window right there. I felt like throwing up because he pointed right at my bedroom window. I immediately dropped back and asked him to clarify. After confirming that he meant my house, I fell to my knee. I was so thankful to have a nosy neighbor at that moment. My neighbor gave the officer a description of the man and this night just kept getting worse. Just like I said earlier, he described the guy as Albert Einstein looking.

I then told the officer about the man's weird behavior earlier at the yard sale. The police took both of our statements and then went on with their night. As of me writing this account, they still haven't caught the guy. My girlfriend and I both barely sleep anymore. Every noise I hear outside now causes me to jump out of my skin. Sometimes when I can't sleep, I find myself sitting in the garage, waiting for him to walk by again. I'm planning on proposing to my girlfriend soon and after that we'll be moving out of this neighborhood for good. I'm worried that I may not get a decent night's sleep as long as I'm still living

in that house. I don't know how truly scary this story is, but it was definitely unsettling and really freaked my boyfriend and me out for months. It happened last year right around this time. Our lease was up in our apartment and we were moving into a house together for the first time. It was sort of a perfect situation. His parents were retiring and moving to Florida and they were basically letting us move into the house and rent it for the price of the mortgage. It was perfect. Before moving in, his parents were selling most of their stuff and the stuff that was left over they decided to have a huge yard sale. Since we wanted to buy all new furniture for technically our first house, we didn't want any of the old furniture that was

currently in the house. The yard sale was a three day event where we sold literally everything, anything from pillowcases to Pokemon cards. On the third day, a strange couple approached my boyfriend and me who were sitting at one of the tables collecting money, and in a chipper and excited voice he asked me, excuse me, but do you have any sacred or haunted items? I kind of started to giggle because I truly thought this guy was joking. After my little laughing episode, I noticed that he was still looking directly at me, completely stone-faced. And then he says, I'm serious. Any haunted items? I'm what you might call a collector.

The woman he was with looked like she was dressed right from the movie Beetlejuice, and the guy was wearing a very tight royal blue suit. I swear to you, he started to basically sing about his haunted collection, and I was ready for some hidden camera crew to come out at any moment and tell me that I was being punked. I couldn't contain my laughter anymore, and I just finally broke. He stopped his weird little rant and looked upset at my laughter anymore and I just finally broke. He stopped his weird little rant and looked upset at my laughter and then he looked around and noticed that a couple of people there were also kind of smirking at him. In a very mean and condescending way that I now regret,

I basically told him to just get lost because I didn't have any haunted items and I really drove home the point that hauntings aren't real. Now sidebar to anybody reading this, sorry, but ghosts aren't real. Anyway, back to this freak. So I felt terrible about basically making fun of this guy and causing a bunch of people to laugh at him in addition to me. He and his girlfriend got into their red car, I couldn't tell what type of car it was, and they drove off. We all continued to laugh and joke around for a little bit, but eventually it just became old news.

It wasn't until the yard sale was almost over that I noticed a red car kept driving by every few minutes. It would slow down for a bit and then speed up past the house. I pointed it out to my boyfriend, but he instantly told me that I was being paranoid, which maybe I was. Red cars are common after all. It was just weird that it kept happening so frequently. He told me that I probably had a guilty conscience, and my mind was tricking me into thinking that I was seeing something that I really wasn't seeing. That night when we were cleaning up, I noticed a red car parked on the road a few houses up.

I know for some people reading this, that isn't that alarming, but this was a very quiet, secluded street and we all knew each other, and I knew nobody on my street drove a red car, especially one that looked like that. I kept an eye on it all night, and the car never moved. This was the first night my boyfriend and I were going to stay overnight and I decided to take the dog out on a walk at around 11 that night. Against my better judgment, I walked by the car that night. Inside, I saw a blue suit jacket, but no people. The jacket alone made my heart beat faster. I didn't know where these people were and if they were around did they mean us any harm? I ran back to the house and made my boyfriend check every lock on the door and I even made him check that all the windows were locked as well.

I didn't sleep at all that first night, maybe because it was a new house but something was telling me that I was in danger. All night long I kept getting out of bed and checking that red car that it was still parked in the road and all night the car stayed there. Around 3.30 or so I looked out the window and I saw that the taillights were on. I remember freaking out and even though nothing was happening, all of a sudden out of nowhere I saw the woman from earlier run from the side of the house and get in the car and then they just peeled off. I waited all night and it

wasn't until about 6am the car drove by again. I know because I was staring out the window the entire night like some creep. The little red car stopped in front of the house and then after a minute or two it drove off into the night for the last night. And that was the last time I ever saw the red car or anybody even closely resembling those two freaks that I saw earlier at the yard sale. I told you, this story isn't incredibly scary, but it's very weird and very unnerving and it just doesn't really make any sense. And what do you think? Were these two just strange and eccentric individuals or were they contemplating something much worse and got scared? Obviously I never reported this to the police because what is there to report? Nothing technically happened and honestly I'm the jerk of this story over anybody

else. It's been a year and I haven't seen them again and I just hope it stays that way for as long as we live in this house. I'm sorry. money growing up and garage sales were a place that I could find toys or books at prices my parents could afford to pay. As I got older, I just became extremely fascinated with what other people had in their collections and what they were selling. I found everything from vintage Disney snow globes to stamps dating back almost a hundred years. Anyway, for the last seven to eight years, myself and a few of my neighbors started a neighborhood garage sale. It started really small, but now I'd say about 50% of the neighborhood participates and other communities drive in to shop at the garage sale. My husband is a collector of many things, so we usually have at least a few good items that we sell for cheap just to get them out of the

house. We have a few regulars who come to our sale every year and will grab whatever furniture or large items that we have for sale that year. The story I'm going to share with you now took place three years ago in July during our neighborhood sale. In our postings in the newspaper and on social media, we give the hours and the days of the sales. We specifically ask for no early birds because people are usually still setting up their yard sales, you know, before 8am. I usually have everything out in the garage the night before and just drag it out to the driveway the next day. I remember my husband was up having some coffee as he had to work that Saturday.

Luckily his job is work from home so he just uses his office in the basement. He asked if I needed any help setting up and I said I was just moving a few tables but we had some time and he should finish his coffee. At around 7am I heard a slamming on the door. Yes, a slamming, like somebody was trying to break through the door. I ran to the door and whipped it open and said, Can I help you? It was a middle-aged man who replies, Yeah, I'm here for the sale.

It said you had collectibles. And I said, Yes, I believe we do have some. They're my husband's, but the sale doesn't start for another hour. Now annoyed, he says, I'm here now, so why don't you just let me look around. I tried to remain calm and friendly and said, We aren't quite set up yet but we do open up at 8am.

A big frown came across his face and he turned around and said that he didn't have to be rude about it. I thought about yelling something back but figured that I would just let it go. He got into a rusty maroon pickup truck and just drove off. My husband asked who it was. I'm sure I said some sarcastic comment about someone pounding on the door and him letting me answer it alone and not even coming over to check. The sale started and was busy as it always is. I was struggling to keep up with the customers early on but at about 10am there was a little break in the rush. I put my head down to check my phone and heard someone say,

Hey, how are you? And to my surprise, it was the same guy from the morning, who seemed to be chipper as ever and completely ignoring our interaction from earlier. He gave me a wide smile that exposed his mouth which looked like it had a total of four teeth. He browsed the collectibles for quite some time and brought up a few baseball cards and checked out. He thanked me and asked if there was anything else for sale, and I said nope, this is it. He said that I was just wondering if maybe he had any more cards or DVDs inside. I told him I could check with my husband and there could potentially be more tomorrow, but for today, this was it. He didn't say anything, just turned around and left.

I took a little break around lunchtime to have lunch with my husband. We both ate at the garage while he was on his break. There were a few people browsing, but not many purchases. And that's when I saw the maroon pickup truck pull up in front of the house for the third time today. I leaned over to my husband and said, this guy's been here twice already and he was the one banging on the door at 7am. He approached both of husband and said, this guy's been here twice already and he was the one banging on the door at 7am. He approached both of us and said, I was here earlier and I think you said that there was going to be some more stuff here. I looked at my husband and back at him and said, that's not the case. My husband's put everything out there for sale and after checking with him there won't be anything near or new for tomorrow.

The same frown from earlier in the morning was back on his face. He looked at my husband and said, I mean, can I take a look around inside? I bet you got lots of stuff in there and I could probably put a good offer on it. My husband said that this is it, that he doesn't have anything else for sale. And now with his big smile on his face, he said, Are you sure? My husband cut him off and said, Listen, that's all we have. I appreciate you stopping by, but if there is anything else you're interested in, I'm sure there are plenty of other sales that might have what you need.

And the man nodded, spun around, and got into his truck and left. The rest of the night went off with no issues and my husband and I made a nice chunk of change for a single day sale. We honestly did so well that we decided to cancel our second day. I thought that I would stop by a few of my neighbor's houses who still had a lot of stuff and help them for the day. At about 7.15 on Saturday, I went over to Debbie's and strangely I noticed her garage was closed and that she wasn't setting anything up yet. She told me to come over at 7, but I came a little late just in case it was too early. After contemplating if I should just go back home or not, I went to the front door.

Before I even had a chance to knock, Debbie opened the door in her robe clutching tissues with her face all red. What happened, I asked her, and she said someone came and broke into the garage and took most of her stuff, at least some of the valuable items. Debbie told me to come in and told me the entire story. She was running through it and I cut her off at one point and said, can you repeat that? And she said, the only thing that her husband caught when he was running outside was a red pickup truck racing down the street, just fast enough that he wasn't able to get a license plate. I asked if the pickup truck was red and rusty and her husband overheard and said, how did you know that? I told Debbie and

her husband about my encounter the day before and they asked if I would share a description and any other information with the police. Of course I agreed, but from what I recall, no one was ever charged and they weren't able to get their belongings back. I know some of you may not think that this post qualifies as a scary encounter, but having the feeling that in your own neighborhood or your own house, you no longer may be safe is one of the rawest fears there is in the world. I still get sick to my stomach when I think about this story and have since installed new security systems and cameras around our property. I still do love garage sailing, but since this event three years ago, I only shop and I don't host. America Online was a big thing when I was 13, or in other words for my generation, AIM, which stood for, you guessed it, AOL Instant Messenger. It was around 2002 and I would have been freshly 13 in 8th grade, and many times I went into

chat rooms by myself or with friends just goofing around. Unfortunately, unsolicited photos were also a thing back then, but you could always avoid them by choosing the right chat room. I didn't have any photos of myself and back then you had to take a digital photo and upload it from your camera. Plus I was 13 and self-conscious which I'm sure many can relate to. But one day a guy popped up on my screen wanting to chat. It went fine at first. I was very naive back then and we quickly fell into a pattern of talking. His name was Dave and he said he lived in California. Eventually he started telling

me that he loved me, etc. However, the problem was that he claimed to be 19. Now I wasn't proud of this but initially being 13 I sent pictures of some random girl and claimed it was me and he instantly fell for it, telling me age is just a number and how mature I was. At this point he didn't live in state so there was never actually any chance of us meeting. Eventually he told me he and his mom were moving to a city about an hour and a half away from me. He started begging me to see him, go to a movie, anything. I had to break the truth about the catfishing and say those weren't pictures of me but of someone else. And he was furious.

He had been envisioning a different type of person this whole time. Dave forgave me a few days later saying I still want to meet you because I love you for who you are. He used all the right words to get a young girl to swoon, and looking back, I realized how young and naive I was at 13. So I told my best friend everything I had explained above and that I wanted her to go with me to meet him. We had a whole plan for him to drive to see me to go to the movies, all because I believed that this was normal. I didn't tell my mom of course and honestly she hadn't noticed any of it happening to begin with. On the day my friend and

I were supposed to meet up with Dave, her mom came and picked us up from school. She said something that made my stomach drop. She said, Chrissy, you're not going to the movies. You're not meeting that man. You could get seriously hurt or kidnapped and I can't allow you guys to just go. I remember crying and crying because I genuinely thought that I could handle everything and be fine. She told me she wasn't going to tell my mom, but I had to promise to never speak to him again and never plan to meet a stranger online. He ended up showing up and was upset I wasn't there. He went on AIM and lost control, something I hadn't seen at that age. It scared me. It scared me to think how close I was to having him near me.

I never talked to Dave again, but I easily believe that if my best friend's mom hadn't intervened, I could have been kidnapped or worse that day. My mom would have been none the wiser and I was none the wiser. But I'm here today and bedroom had a window looking out in my backyard. The backyard was fenced in, but on the other side of the fence were some woods and a retention pond. I'd never been scared of this and kept the blinds open so that when the sun rose in the morning, the natural light would help me wake up. One night, I was up late on my phone with my dog laying in bed next to me. At around 2 am, my dog jumped up and started barking at the window. At first I thought he was just barking at his own reflection and I told him to stop.

But I then realized that he was looking at the left side of the window while his reflection was on the right. I couldn't see outside the window because I had left the lamp on my nightstand on. All I could see in the window was the reflection of my bedroom. Not wanting to alert whatever might be out there that I was scared, I faked a yawn, set my phone aside and turned off the lamp. I then laid down facing the window and, I swear, I saw a set of human eyes looking back at me from the left side of that window.

I drink a lot of water at night so I had an empty bottle on my nightstand. I grabbed it and pretended to just realize that it was empty. I turned on the lamp and acted like I was going to get water. I went to my parents' room and my dad told me not to worry. We had these motion activated flood lights and they hadn't turned on so there was no way anything was out there. I went back to my room and told myself that I was just seeing things. I closed the blinds and turned off the lamp and got some sleep. When I woke up in the morning I went to take my dog out and decided to check out the pine

straw bedding underneath my window, and it was very visibly disturbed. I did my best to ignore that and remember what my dad said about the floodlights. That worked pretty well, until my dad tested the floodlights later that day and found that the bulbs had burned out. To this day, I keep my blinds closed and my lamp off when I sleep. I don't want to risk anything being able to see me and if anything is somehow peeking through my window I want to know it's there. If there was someone at my window that night, thank God my dog saw it first. Back in 2014, I moved to a beautiful town in the northeastern United States. It was just quiet enough for me and I couldn't wait to start my new life here. I had just started seeing someone a few weeks prior to this happening, but we weren't living together at this time of the story, so I was alone most nights, which I didn't mind at the time.

When I started seeing my new girlfriend, she made it clear to me that we couldn't sit and blow up stone-cold Steve Austin furniture anymore, and I needed to find real furniture. And I hate to say it, but she was right. I found a lot of stuff at the thrift store, but garage sales were where I was furnishing my entire house. Lamps, tables, couches, you name it, I was buying. One Saturday afternoon when I was looking for kitchen stuff, I met this one guy who was selling some really cool stuff. It wasn't your typical garage sale junk. He had weird statues and all these relics from different religions. He told me that he and his son used to collect artifacts from all over the world and they were

fascinated by different cultures and ideas. I was truly just interested in his stories. He went on to tell me that his son took a job in Japan and that he wasn't coming back anytime soon. He told me that his son said it was okay to sell all this stuff since it was probably worthless. Either way, the stuff was awesome and I was totally willing to buy some of this junk for cheap. I'm a collector of weird oddities myself so to be able to get some more weird stuff to throw on my bookshelf was something I couldn't pass up. I grabbed some rocks from some ancient city I forgot the name of and some ancient Babylonian statues that the guy assured me were just replicas but my guests don't have

to know that. As he was laying out some more relics, some older woman came over and almost flipped the table. She started to claim that the symbols on one of the rocks were cursed and against her religion. I told her to relax and that the rocks were fake but she wasn't having it. This woman was probably like 75 years old and she got so nervous that she actually started to cry. I gestured to the guy to put the stuff away and that I would come back later to take a look at them, and that's exactly what I did. But in the meantime, I walked the woman to her car and made sure that she was alright. I even apologized for buying the allegedly cursed items, and I lied to her and just told her

that I even returned them. I ended up spending almost $70 but I bought almost all the weird relics and occult items that this guy had. When I got home, I decorated my whole house with them. I was pleased and quite happy with my day of garage sale hunting. I was talking to my girlfriend that night on the phone who was happy for me but gave me a piece of her mind about buying more junk that I didn't need and again she was right. We ended up talking on the phone for a long time that night. Before I knew it, it was after midnight and I was ready for bed. We were still on the phone and as I was getting into bed, I heard the sound of a door shut.

And without hanging up, I told her that I was going to go check it out, even though she told me not to. I'm sure that it was probably just the wind or air pressure slamming the basement door or something, even though that really hasn't happened before, but I guess it could have been the first time. I remember while I was walking down the upstairs hallway, my girlfriend was convinced that these items were cursed. I just remember specifically laughing out loud at that. And when I got to the bottom of the stairs, I could hear a voice coming from around the corner. While on the phone with my girlfriend, I texted her and said to please just call 911, and I heard a voice coming from my living room. The voice was soft and gentle, I guess, and it was clearly some older woman's voice and she just kept muttering no, no, no, no.

I instantly remembered the old woman from the garage sale earlier that day. There's no way I thought. And I finally worked up the courage to peek around the corner and I couldn't believe my eyes. The woman was kneeling down in front of my bookcase, rocking back and forth, repeatedly saying no. I didn't engage with her and figured that I would just let the police deal with it. I just hoped that they would show up soon though. Thankfully, the police showed up in about two minutes. They came up and, in a very calm and professional way, they apprehended the woman who became erratic, claiming that my house was

cursed and that she was trying to just bless my home. I thanked her, but trust me when I tell you I had those cops take her out of my house. I found out after the fact that the woman was just not mentally all there. She was diagnosed with some laundry list worth of things and the fact that she was still out there driving in her mental state is what's truly horrifying. It's also sad but she didn't have any family or friends and this poor woman was just apparently alone in the world. I don't know what happened to her after this and it wouldn't surprise me one bit if she's still alive and kicking. I'm so thankful that my girlfriend called the police that night because it gives me chills thinking about what could have happened if I didn't act when I did. This isn't important but I think it's worth noting. That girlfriend in the story is now my wife and still to this day I have all these

weird statues and stuff all over my house. So if I am cursed, I'm still waiting for the bad luck. To start off, I'd like to state that I am a 20-year-old male who lives in the UK in a house with my family. My family consists of my dad, mom, sister, two stepsisters, one quite young and the other almost as old as me, and a young stepbrother. So there are a lot of people living in this house, and we also have a German shepherd who is quite large and protective of the property. As well as that, this story needs some background to make sense. I currently live in a town in the UK that could be considered safe, but it has its fair share of dangerous people lurking around. I previously worked at a gas station where I've had numerous encounters with people trying to shoplift, many of them carrying knives and such. I hope this gives you a brief idea of what my neighborhood is like.

Now that that's been said, this story happened only a few days ago. My cat had been missing for a few weeks, which wasn't normal for him, so I was evidently quite worried. I had been keeping my window open every night in case he came into our garden and started meowing, like he usually does when he wants to come back into the house. I had spent the past few nights going out and looking for him but finding and hearing nothing. This night was like any other. I was spending the night playing games and listening closely for anything coming from my window. At around 3am in the morning, I thought that I had heard something, so I bolted downstairs because I believed that what I was hearing was my cat. I thought of taking my dog

with me in case I needed protection, but I realized that that would be a terrible idea since the cat is scared of the dog, so if the cat really was out there, he would just run away the second he saw the dog. I go outside with a flashlight in hand and started to hear weird noises. I couldn't put my finger on the noises at first, but when I listened closer, I realized that they were the sounds of scuffling around the back of the garden where we have a garage, a greenhouse, and a chicken coop. My first thought was there was some sort of animal trying to get at the chickens. This didn't worry me because we have a very aggressive rooster that can and will attack anyone that gets too close to the chickens. He has done so multiple times in the past.

I started walking closer to the back of the garden and the noises started to sound more human-like. It sounded like multiple people were running around. I was confused and stopped for a moment, standing there and listening. A gut feeling started brewing in my stomach, telling me to just go back inside, but I couldn't move. I didn't know if it was because of fear or me trying to come up with a reasonable explanation for the sounds. The more I listened, the more frequent the sounds got, as if something or someone was trying to lure me to them. I went back inside to grab the biggest knife I could and started scanning the garage with my dog, finding nothing. When I got back outside, I heard the chickens going crazy, which made me think that there was an animal attacking them.

I walked to the chicken coop to check on them and make sure that they were okay and they calmed down. As I exited the chicken coop, I soon realized that the sounds had all stopped. I stood still, searching for the sounds trying to strain my ears. After what felt like hours standing there in the pitch dark with my flashlight not daring to point it in the direction of where I heard the sounds previously, I snapped out of my daze and bolted back into the house. I made sure to lock the front door and when I got to my room I left my window open and to my surprise I heard whispering. Whispering coming from the garden and then a sudden metallic bang. I thought I was imagining things, and this was all some sort of dream or hallucination. The next night I went out again, calling my cat's name multiple times, but I got no response. Then I heard the snapping of branches coming from the direction where the

greenhouse was located. I stood there, and I heard a person scraping or hitting something with a stick followed by footsteps coming towards me. I hurried back into the house and I heard my gate opening so I locked the door just in case. Right after I closed the door, the handle slammed down which scared the life out of me. I immediately thought that it was someone from my garden coming for me. I opened the door, ready to fight the person on the other side and it turned out to be my sister coming back from walking the dog. I'd like to say thank you to her for scaring the soul out of me and putting me in full fight mode. She asked me why I was going around locking all the doors, and I explained to her everything that had happened over the past few nights, specifically what had happened the night before and that night.

After I told her the story, she obviously didn't believe me and told me that it was all in my head. I told her that the sounds were there right now and asked her to come with me if she didn't believe me. We stood in the garden, listening, and on cue, the sounds started back up again. My sister stopped dead in her tracks. I looked at her and said, I told you so, but she shushed me. The sound of someone jogging or sprinting towards us came from the darkness. We both ran back into the house and my sister reasonably demanded that we lock all the doors in the home. On the third night of looking for my cat, I was sitting in my room and decided not to go outside because of all that had previously happened. At 2am, I decided

to go outside and look for my cat once again. I put on my coat because that night I was determined to finally find my cat and put this all behind me, not caring how long it would take. I stood there in the open pitch black outside again, calling my cat's name, but I didn't get a response. I went to the front of the garden with my flashlight, looking and calling for him as well. After not getting any response, I sat myself down on the front steps of my house, flashing my light and still calling for my cat. An hour went by, and I got thoroughly bored just sitting there doing nothing. I started walking around the garden again, headed towards the greenhouse. I stopped myself, remembering what had happened the previous night. Thinking

about it, I went and got the dog, both for protection and because, as stated before, the dog would bark if the cat was there. This would tell me if the cat was there or not. I know, genius thinking on my part, and the dog and I went towards the greenhouse area knowing that either my cat was there or there was some random person. I let the dog go and she did nothing. No barking, just silence. This gave me a feeling of relief that allowed me to walk after her still scanning the area. And then I saw it. The discovery that chilled me to my bones. Someone had sunk a stick into the ground through a plastic bag. Now you might be thinking to yourself, why did a stick

in the ground scare you? The reason being that it was sunk so deep into the ground, not even I, being pretty fit, could take it out of the ground. Someone had stabbed that stick into the ground with a scary amount of force, making the situation worse. There was a pumpkin sitting right next to the stick knife, as I called it. But here's the thing, we don't grow pumpkins, we never have. But there it was, a pumpkin, sitting in our garden. It clicked in my head that there had either been one person or multiple people in the garden that night. The sounds that my sister and I had heard were people sharpening the sticks and messing about with them. They had been making noises around the property to lure someone out to investigate and do God knows what to them. In that moment, I was thankful to have had the common sense to run away when I did

because thinking about what these people could have done to me in the dark gives me chills even as I write this. After this revelation, I checked behind the trees and such making sure no one was there. Content with not finding anyone and making a note to myself to come back in the morning to get a clearer picture, I returned to my steps. I sat there, waiting for around an hour longer. Starting to get tired, bored and hungry, I went back into the house. The acceptance of my cat being dead lurked into the back of my mind while I continued to mess about on my PC with my window open. And then, once again, I heard meowing. I rushed outside so quickly that I forgot to put on shoes, but I also had the presence of mind to grab a knife on my way out, deciding that if

anyone was out there, I'd confront them on the spot. I reached my gate and saw my cat standing on the fence. I dropped my knife and my heart was filled with joy. I can't explain to you how happy I was to see him there. There had been no noises since that night but I'm still wary when I go out at night. I thought about this experience and realized how lucky I was to not have gone further into the greenhouse that night. I could have been killed right there or one of my younger siblings could have heard the noises and gone out themselves and they'd been killed. I try not to dwell on it too much because the thoughts truly disturb me. When I was 14, I worked at a McDonald's that was connected to a gas station. It was a truck stop, so it was very busy 90% of the time. The only downside to working at a truck stop fast food place was that the

bathroom was on the complete other side of the building. I was a freshman in high school, and at the time I was pretty small, maybe not in height, but in size. I was around 5'6", anywhere between 130 to 150 pounds. Not super tiny, but small enough to where I might have been an easy target. This wasn't a fear of mine, however, but maybe it should have been. I remember I was in gym class, it was maybe the middle of the school day, and it was one of those days where we could just sit on the side and catch up on work for other classes if we didn't want to participate in the game. My friends and I did this almost all the time and almost

never actually worked on anything important. We were laughing and joking around until I received power school notifications on my school iPad excusing me from the remaining classes of the day. I was really confused because my mom hadn't mentioned anything about picking me up early and I was only seeing my dad every other weekend and he wasn't the type to pick me up from school. I was grounded so I didn't have a phone with me other than a cheap flip phone my mom had gotten me from Walmart. I texted her about the notifications but before I got a response back from her, my gym teacher told me that I needed to grab my things and go to the office because my mom would be picking me up. This confused me more and I shot my mom another text asking if she was picking me up from school.

She freaked out and told me not to leave the building. At this point I was sitting in the office by the window waiting for apparently nobody to come pick me up until the situation was figured out. My mom ended up calling the school and letting them know that I wasn't allowed to leave with anyone that day. Apparently whoever called claimed to be my mom and said that they were coming to pick me up. As far as I know, nobody ever showed up to pick me up and I didn't hear anything else about it. My mom wasn't comfortable with me working at that truck stop and we got my location switched to a McDonald's that was closer in town and wasn't connected to a gas station.

What we think might have happened is someone saw my name tag and possibly called all the schools in the area until they found me, but I still have no idea how they would have known my last name. With that being said, creepy stranger who pretended to be my mom over the phone and tried to pull me out of school. Better luck next time. My mom and I, a nine-year-old female, were shopping for bathing suits in a big department store, just the two of us. We were the only ones in the woman's fitting rooms. I needed a suit in a different size, so my mom said that she would go look for it. I locked the door behind her and was just kind of vibing in there by myself.

Not long after she left, I heard someone walk into the fitting rooms and stop. A man spoke. Hello? I didn't answer. Is someone in here? My nine-year-old take was that maybe the store was closing and this was just a male employee making sure that there was no one still in there before close. I wanted to pipe up so I didn't get locked in, but I couldn't answer. I suddenly had this horrible feeling of dread that was so overwhelming in the moment I couldn't actually move or speak. It was approximately 20 seconds of silence before he repeated the question and approximately 20 more before I heard him leave the fitting rooms. My mom turned up not long after and we left. I didn't tell her about this until I was 21.

I still think about this encounter after years of learning to trust my gut. I've only had that exact feeling a couple of times in my life since and each time it was clear that my life was definitely in danger. Maybe it was nothing, but I still wonder about it and remember it putting me on edge, even as an adult. I'm a 20 year old female and I recently moved into a new apartment with my boyfriend who works away for long periods of time. An older man, maybe 50 years old, started to become pretty friendly with me, knowing that I was new to the complex. I made the mistake of

telling him that I live with my partner, but he's away for work for a while. Almost every day after that, he came knocking on my door and waited if I didn't answer. He would leave after about five minutes of knocking and no response. Now one time I was out in the common grass area playing with my brother, a two-year-old little boy whom I would occasionally have over from time to time and babysit. I saw him coming my way and quickly picked up my brother. The man started making conversation, asking about my brother and literally tried to grab him out of my arms. I held on to my brother tightly, pulled away and as he started to cry, I made an excuse that I have to go feed him and I just

walked away. And that was the last time I went near that man with my brother. I'm extremely bad with confrontation as you can tell. A few days later, I heard a knock at my door and I opened it without thinking. He was walking straight past me into my apartment without even saying a single word, just smiling. I asked him if he was doing okay and he says, I'm good, I just wanted to see what your place looked like from inside. And he started walking into every room, checked all my windows and commented, hmm, so all your windows have bars on them except the bathroom. I nervously laughed and said, yeah, I guess they do. I didn't know what to do, so I walked out into the garden, hoping that he would follow me out of the apartment to try to talk to me.

I just wanted him out, but was scared to anger him. I could tell that he didn't seem like he was right in the head. Once he came out the front, I closed my door and said, I gotta go to the shop now. Sorry, it's probably gonna close soon, and walked off. That night while hanging my wash out, another neighbor introduced herself, this 34-year-old woman. I told her what had happened and asked if she knew the man. Apparently, he had been doing the exact same things to her. She told her partner and that was his last straw. He ended up going and talking to the older man. After that, the older man only tried one more time that I know of to knock on my door which I hid in my kitchen for about 10 minutes until he eventually left. I haven't heard anything since and haven't seen

him around but I wake up at night sometimes panicking, thinking that he's planning on doing something to me. I just got back from shopping and was parking my car. I was just about to open my door when for some reason I had an off feeling. I looked to my left and I saw a woman with a hood standing a few feet away from me. When she saw me, she stopped walking towards me and backed up a few steps. I pretended to look through my purse, hoping that she would know that I had seen her and she would leave. She then went and hid behind my truck so I couldn't see her. My car doors were locked but I didn't know what side she was on.

I waited about two more minutes and then I had seen her run a few feet to the corner and hide beside a house. I kept looking back and kept seeing her peek her head out to see if I got out of the car. I called my dad and asked him if he can come to the car and help me walk home and he came running down the street with a bat and the woman left running. Always be aware of your surroundings. If I didn't look to my left, I would have been potentially robbed or even worse. I now carry something with me in my hand anytime I'm getting out of my car. Always. When I was younger, around 20, I'm now 32, I worked in an assisted living home in rural Minnesota. I enjoyed the job and found fulfillment in helping the elderly.

Once I realized how much I enjoyed the job, I had plans to further my career in nursing. During my time at this assisted living facility, I worked night shift as they aligned well with my college schedule. I was the only younger person on the night shift, working alongside individuals in their mid-thirties and older. I've learned a lot from these colleagues, heard unsettling stories of their experiences, and made a few friends whom I still keep in touch with today. One night while working there, I was assigned to the third floor where there were about 15 residents at the time. I had gotten to know all of them and had become particularly close to a few. One lady, whom we'll refer to as Judy, not her real name, was my absolute favorite. We would spend hours talking whenever she was awake at night, unable to fall asleep. Judy was in her 80s and in good shape. On this particular night, Judy called me to her room to help her fix her TV.

After tightening the cables on the back of her TV, we sat and talked for a good 20 minutes. She shared her plan to walk to the nearby park in the morning, something she did every day. Her routine involved walking to the park with a bag of bread, sitting on the benches next to the water and feeding the geese. After a while of conversing, I informed her that I needed to continue my rounds and that I would see her the following night. We exchanged goodbyes and as I was leaving her room, she said, Alicia, you're a good kid. I smiled and proceeded to carry on my rounds. A few hours later, at around 4.30am, my co-workers and I decided to go outside for a smoke break. We sat in the cold 40 degree weather, smoking and chatting, and while outside, we noticed an older lady walking down the sidewalk away from the building.

She looked familiar, and I recognized her when I saw the bag of bread that she was carrying. That's a little early for Judy, isn't it? My coworker remarked. I suppose so, I replied, and we shared a laugh and continued smoking. Suddenly our pagers buzzed all at once and we rushed back inside. The coworker who paged us had a noticeably sad expression. They hugged me for about 30 seconds during which time I felt a sense of confusion. This co-worker was familiar with my family so I worried that something might have happened to them. Perplexed as ever, I followed them to the elevator and up to the third floor. My heart sank as they led me to Judy's room. I could hear sirens in the background and I immediately realized that the news wouldn't

be good. To my shock, there lay Judy, lifeless in her bed. My coworker and I had exchanged incredulous glances and I experienced a mix of sadness and just bewilderment. Hadn't we just seen Judy walking in the direction of the park she frequented? I knew I wasn't imagining things as my co-workers had seen her too. We never discussed it again, as unsettling as it was. We simply came to the conclusion that Judy was doing what she loved on the night that she passed, walking to the park to feed the geese. I'm sorry. Recently, I've been getting more into cosplaying and attending conventions. I've been making all my own clothes for a while now, but I only recently decided to truly delve into cosplay.

I've attended several conventions this year, and this is the first negative experience I've encountered. But anyway, for this particular convention, I wore my self-made Supergirl cosplay, which I designed and patterned myself. Overall, I was quite satisfied with how it turned out. Numerous people asked me for photos, and I generally agreed. However, later in the convention, my friends left, and since I was planning to meet up with other friends later that night, I took a break from wandering around and sat in a hallway with a small seating area. A person approached me and requested a photo. I agreed and stood up to pose.

Out of nowhere, he stated, Hey, thanks for being one of the few cosplayers who actually has the physique to pull off that cosplay. Now taken aback, I asked, Excuse me? And decided I no longer wanted to take a picture with him. While he rambled and attempted to backtrack, I picked up my bag and began walking away. He then physically grabbed me and tried to prevent me from leaving. I pushed him away, firmly stating, do not touch me, and walked off. Despite his shouts behind me, I paid no attention to any of his words and simply telling him to not touch me again. And at that moment, I didn't have the opportunity to report him since my primary concern was just distancing myself from the situation. However, about 15

minutes later, on my way to meet the other friends I mentioned earlier, I spotted him again. Naturally, I immediately headed towards the nearest staff member to report him and as I glanced over my shoulder, I noticed that he was giving me an unsettling, intense gaze, reminiscent of an edgy anime protagonist. I recounted the incident to a staff member while he advanced towards me. By the time I finished explaining, he was standing just five feet away from me, attempting to justify himself by saying, what I meant was that most cosplayers are overweight. I cut him off and walked away because my friends were waiting for me. Seriously, I knew exactly what you meant the first time and that's precisely why I thought

you were being disrespectful. His initial response was defensive rather than a sincere apology for grabbing me when I was trying to leave. Later that night, I followed up with ConOps and they informed me that they had spoken to him, placed him on a watch list and mentioned, I'm not excusing this behavior, but he explained that he is autistic and didn't intend any harm. I stated that harm was still inflicted and he made me feel extremely unsafe. The con ops person assured me that they would work on banning him from the weekend, though not from the entire convention. I only attended the convention on Friday due to work commitments on Saturday and Sunday, so I'm unsure if any further incidents occurred after that. I thought a lot about sharing this experience and I finally decided to share it with you here.

When I was about four, I went to the pharmacy with my mom. Now keep in mind that the area where the store was located was a middle class, mostly peaceful neighborhood. So as my mother was buying what she needed, an old man entered the store. He was probably in his late 60s or early 70s. I remember that while I was waiting for my mom to finish shopping, I started doing some ballet moves. At the time, I took ballet classes. When the man saw me, he complimented my ballet moves and told me that he had a niece at home who also took ballet classes. I remember the man asking if I wanted to go with him to meet his niece and play with her.

Being the naive child that I was, I said yes, and the man told me to follow him. As we almost reached the exit of the store, my mom called my name and I went to her, leaving the old man behind. I didn't realize that it was a dangerous situation until I was much older. I asked my mom why she didn't react earlier when she saw the man talking with me and my mom tells me that she was going to save me but she wanted to see if I would follow the man. Now looking back on this I realize how lucky I am for my mom and how vicious this incident could have turned out. This happened about five years ago. First, a little background.

My dad had trained me in how to keep calm and stressful or life-or-death situations, and I had done the same with my kids. My kids were 12 and 13 years old, sitting in the back seat. My elderly mom was right next to me. We had just finished our errands, and I asked if anyone wanted to go to the popular small lake that has a one-way road going around it about one mile in circumference before going home. They all immediately wanted to do so, mostly to see the new duck chicks. There was a maximum speed of about 20 miles per hour and several places to exit if you

didn't want to complete the full circle. The low speed limit was because many people were coming here for fishing or walking or jogging. We got to see the baby ducks and slowed to a stop at times to all over the tiny chicks. I was halfway around when a huge man in a big truck went racing around the lake at about 50 miles per hour. There was a lot of screaming from people trying to get out of his way. I immediately started to speed up to take an exit off the road. I was almost there when I heard the truck's engine. My mom screamed and the kids were frozen in fear as I looked into the rearview mirror. He was coming up on us fast. He slammed on the brakes and came just inches from

hitting the back of my car. Then he started following me aggressively, screaming all sorts of insults. I sped up and got out of there, but he kept following me. My mom was freaking out, and my kids were terrified, but doing the breathing exercises that I had taught them to stay calm. I yelled at my mom to be quiet. I threw my cell phone to my oldest son and told him to call 911, informed the dispatcher that we were headed to the police station, and asked them to have a few cops waiting for us. He did so, screaming in fear at times as the man went down a side street

and then turned back to try and ram us off the road. He would get in front of me, slam on his brakes, park to block the road, or attempt a pit maneuver. I later thanked God that my dad had been in the military and had taught me many maneuvers to avoid aggressive drivers. I managed to avoid all the things he was doing. The dispatcher heard the terrified screams every time I had to brake hard or swerve the car.

I was swearing like crazy. We made it to the police station where several cops were waiting for us. The guy was so angry that I don't think he realized where we were. He parked right behind me to block me in, got out of his truck, still screaming, and came around to my side. He got even angrier when the cops wouldn't let him near me. He swung out and punched one of the cops so hard in the head that the officer was actually knocked out. He got tasered and sprayed as he was tackled down. It took several cops to hold him down when he suddenly went quiet. He suddenly realized where he was and began struggling again,

saying that they couldn't arrest him because he didn't know that they were cops at that moment. I let out a relieved breath once he was in the backseat of a cop car. Paramedics came to check us all out. My mom had to be taken to the ER due to extremely high blood pressure and chest pains. My kids and I were also taken in. As soon as they realized that we were safe, the hysterical crying and clinging to me began. I was shaking and felt cold despite the warm temperatures and I was told that I was in shock. After we all returned home, except for my mom who had to stay overnight,

the kids were too terrified to sleep in their beds and wanted to sleep with me. But we were all too wired to sleep so I made some sleepy time tea and gave them melatonin. I on the other hand didn't take anything and the comforting noises my home usually makes became scary. A few days later I received a phone call from one of the arresting officers who told me that the man had several arrest warrants for similar things. He also told me that the guy had every intention of killing me and everyone else in my car simply because he was angry and wanted to vent it out. So it was a good thing that I called 911 and went to the police station. It would have taken me a few weeks before I could fall asleep easily again. I had to put my kids into counseling and I still have nightmares from it, but they're really rare now. This is something I've never really told anyone about, but I've been thinking about it a lot lately, so here it is.

A few years back, 2015-2016, when I was about 18-19, I used to work at this little cafe inside a car parts factory. It was essentially a fully equipped yet compact restaurant kitchen and lunchroom for the workers to eat. Well, one day I received a call from my best friend and co-worker. She was quite upset because of a creepy new temp worker who made her feel extremely uncomfortable by asking her a bunch of personal questions. These questions included details about what she drove, where she lived, her relationship status, if she had any children, and when she finished work, among others. Given that she was my age, 18 to 19, and this guy was in his mid to late 30s, possibly even in his

early 40s, and we were in Flint, Michigan, we weren't willing to take any risks. I drove up to the parking lot, found her car, parked next to it and had a security guard accompany her out. We didn't spot the guy then, but she described him to me and the guard and that was the end of it for a few days. Someone informed him to stay away from her and he complied. However, then he encountered me. I recognized him immediately as soon as he approached the register to place his lunch order. This was from the description my friend had given me and the unsettling vibe that he was emitting. He subjected me to the same intense Q&A that he had subjected my friend to.

However, instead of telling him off, calling security, or taking any similar action, I decided to tell him a series of outright lies. I informed him that I drove a blue 2012 Honda Civic, which I knew for a fact belonged to one of the second shift managers. This manager typically parked near the front of the building, so I knew the car would be there until the second shift ended at 11pm. I also told him that my shift ended at around 9.30, which was actually when I usually slipped out for a cigarette break. When 9.30 arrived later that night, I stepped outside to smoke my cigarette. Just as I anticipated, there was that creepy guy in the parking lot, close to the area where the Honda Civic was parked. He was pacing back and forth behind two vehicles parked a few spaces down in the same row, engrossed in his phone the whole time. At one point, he glanced up and saw me staring at him. However, with my substantial leather

winter coat and a hat on, I wasn't sure if he recognized me from a distance at first. I finished my smoke and returned inside to explain the entire situation to the security guards. One of them was the same guard who had escorted my friend to her car a couple of days earlier. They found it incredibly amusing that I had managed to deceive the guy and catch him behaving suspiciously. I'm not entirely sure what they did after that because I went back to work, but I do know that they immediately confronted him in the parking lot and he was fired that very week. To this day I still don't know what his intentions were, however it doesn't take a genius to deduce that they couldn't have been

anything positive. Ultimately the moral of the story is always have your friends backs and trust your instincts. If you don't, you could end up trapped in the parking lot and potentially targeted or abducted by some creepy individual who asked too many questions. And since I didn't include this originally, after my friend and I were informed that the guy was fired, we were given his full name. My friend paid to conduct a background check on him which revealed a history of violent criminal activity including domestic abuse, assault and battery with a weapon, jail time for violating a PPO, and parole violations among other things. I hope this clarifies that we weren't just getting creepy vibes. I'm an older woman and back when I was young, things were different. You could hitchhike with creepy guys in bands.

We just called them hippies. But it was also a time when serial killers roamed free. I grew up on a farm in South Carolina. No paved roads and not a lot of communication from the outside world. My best friend and I decided to walk to the only store and post office slash gas station for some candy. It was highly unusual because we never had any money. As we were walking, our car came driving by really, really slowly. We didn't think anything of it because the roads were not the best. We were not the most worldly kids and no one ever told us about stranger danger.

We knew everyone and talked to anyone who said hi. Well, this car passed and then we saw it turn around. We didn't think much about it, but then it came up to us and stopped. I might not have known what danger from a stranger was, but I had this horrible nauseous feeling when I looked in the car, like when you see an animal predator and don't know what you should do. All I knew was that I had the feeling of let's run. My friend must not have gotten that feeling because she went right up to the car. The man was greasy and dirty but we were used to seeing people like that out working. He asked us if we wanted a ride and she said sure and I said nah we need to walk. She looked so

mad at me like I had ruined her day so she said that she was going to go on a walk with me. I could see his hand move as if though he was going to open the door and I suddenly got that feeling of dread. Everything started to go in slow motion so I grabbed my friend's arm and pulled her back. Just then another car was coming from the opposite way and he drove off pretty quick. She was so mad at me for hurting her arm and I did leave a couple of bruises. Now a few years later, she came over and looked like she was going to pass out. She had a newspaper in her hand and couldn't say anything so I looked at it and it was the same man who had tried to get

us into his car. His name was Pee Wee Gaskins. Now here's the link to the show of what a vile, disgusting human he was. And y'all please don't be afraid to hurt someone's feelings. I was literally taught to obey every adult but if I had, we wouldn't be here today. Arm yourself. It doesn't matter if it's a firearm, taser, pepper spray, or knife. People are not nice. Mental illness is out of control and criminals outnumber us. So always be aware, and always follow your gut. Last week, I stayed at a youth hostel in the famous old town of Prague for two nights. The dormitory was a mixed room with ten beds. One night at 4am, I went to use the restroom. To my surprise, I saw a naked man standing in my dorm room, possibly with an erection.

I tried my best to ignore him, pretending that I saw nothing and returned to bed. However in the following ten minutes, I began to hear a distinct sound of someone vigorously rubbing wet flesh, which I assumed was the sound of him touching himself. I made an effort to mentally block out this noise trying to fall back asleep and decided to report him to the reception first thing in the morning. After he finished, he went to the toilet to wash his hands and then moved to the bunk bed next to mine, which was odd as I remember a woman occupying it earlier that night. Approximately 30 minutes later, I noticed the people in the adjacent bunk had left their beds and were talking to the reception.

I immediately woke up, assuming they had also witnessed this inappropriate behavior. To my shock, this individual had urinated on the bed of a young lady nearby. She had left her belongings and personal items on the bed and she explained that her belongings were soaked due to his actions. I assumed the young lady was away drinking when this incident occurred. The receptionist informed us that unfortunately there was no CCTV cameras in the kitchen or room to capture the incident on video. I felt extremely disturbed by the situation and decided to check out immediately. I went to the bus station to catch my bus and find a place to sleep. For some reason, I felt calmer and safer sleeping at the bus station than in that unsettling room.

I sincerely hope that both the other guests and the receptionist reported this incident to the police and that the perpetrator was apprehended. If you happen to be one of the guests and are reading this, I would appreciate an update on the situation. So this happened when I was 21. I'm currently 27. I'm a female, but back then, I believe I made a rookie mistake. But I have since learned my lesson and taken precautions to ensure this doesn't happen again. I'm an avid mountain biker. Ever since I was about 13 to 14, I've loved riding on the trails. It's good exercise, but I mostly enjoy listening to music and just pedaling. I've never tried to time myself on a particular trail or anything. All I really did was keep track of my miles. I remember this one day in particular. It might sound a bit far-fetched, so I welcome skepticism with open arms. I'm just trying to get this off my chest and I

hopefully serve as a wake-up call for anyone who was as trusting as I was. I decided to go for a day ride at this one spot. I had been there before but it wasn't one of my go to trails so I wasn't super familiar with it. I was familiar enough though to be comfortable going down the trails that I had done in the past. Upon arriving there I was getting my pack ready when I met this girl who was doing the same thing. We started talking and hit it off quite well. At the time,

she genuinely seemed like someone I could be friends with. She introduced me to her boyfriend who was also a mountain biker and once again, no red flags. They were both very friendly. They appeared to have a very healthy relationship as well. They both seemed to be around my age, give or take. They asked if I wanted to ride with them down their favorite trail, and I didn't see any harm in it. Besides, I wanted to learn the area better for potential future rides. The trail was one that I had never been on before. They were both faster riders than me, much faster in fact. I never backed down from a challenge. I kept up, although I was probably about 10 feet behind them the whole time. We stopped briefly for a water break and I noticed that the girl had strategically left her backpack slightly open.

It seemed harmless then, but it makes sense now. Without any warning, while I was taking a pee break in the trees, they suddenly started laughing and just took off. I was in a compromised position so I hurried up and finished up to catch them, and by the time I got back to my bike they were completely out of sight, not to mention both of my tires had been slashed. I was stranded. I sat down for about 10 minutes to decide what to do. The sun was at its peak and I remember feeling extremely lightheaded although I'm pretty sure this was due to shock. I grabbed my bike and started walking down the trail. After about 15 minutes of walking I came across a wire on the trail. It was tied between two smaller trees. If I had been riding that could have easily slit my throat. However,

the fact that they went through the trouble of slashing my tires made me question this. I hadn't seen them so this may or may not have been them, or they could have potentially left it there to try and snare another rider. I honestly don't know and I don't think about that part much anymore. The what ifs make the whole thing more frustrating. Regardless, I used my Swiss army knife to remove the wire. I wasn't going to go any further down the trail so I pushed my bike in the opposite direction. Close to six miles later, I made it back to my car. There's a bike rental shop nearby that I stopped at and asked about the two. I gave them a description but I couldn't provide enough details for them to be identified. They offered to call the police but

after the day I had I just wanted to go home. I do regret this because over the years I've wondered if they did this to anyone else and I did feel a level of guilt over this. I've never been back to that trail. I'm still a mountain biker, but I no longer go alone. Fortunately, my husband is also a fellow mountain biker, so I always have a buddy. And please stay safe, everyone, and don't always trust a pretty face. To be continued... Hey friends, thanks for listening. Click that notification bell to be alerted of all future narrations. I release new videos every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 7pm EST. If you get a story, be sure to submit them to my subreddit, r slash let's read official, and maybe even hear your story featured on the next video.

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