/feels/ - Advice & Venting

ive been stuck on how to deal with this information for months. i am very scared of retaliation because they datamined information off of me from my accounts.

a couple of months ago i added a guy from /soc/ who appeared to me as a very shy, but intelligent person. he listed off many hobbies, achievements, and interests that seemed to denote someone who was thoughtful and unique.

i was in a very low point in my life due to circumstances that happened with another person in my life. so i had been befriending people off of /soc/ for a bit and that's when we started talking.

i quickly found out that we shared a board on 4chan together and that had peaked my interest. i remember one day, i can't exactly remember the post, but i got a response to one of the posts i had made. it referenced my ethnicity as a southern european in a way that made it seem like he recognized who i was, and slowly i realized that he had become familiar with recognizing my posting style on the board.

things took a turn from here.
at the beginning, posts centered around our different opinions on topics like race, gender, religion, and society. i enjoyed going on the board because i thought i had shared a place that i could come to to ramble about my interests and have someone i knew listen, and other anons could chip in if they wanted to.
i dont remember when exactly things started to change. i already had a strange feeling about him because he had a fixation with polygamy and harems, something that was offputting to me but i chalked it down to a difference of opinions. we spoke about controversial things so i had tolerated it for the most part, and i couldnt necessarily avoid him if i wanted to keep using the board.

over time we became more sexually intimate and i remember distinctly, that one day i sent him nude photos. when i went to the board later, i read a post describing my body as being masculine and the op disliked that his girlfriend (me) wasnt causing sexual arousal. i confronted him and he quickly dismissed it by saying he didn't mean it.

it feels… like everything just got worse that day. i started reading posts about my ethnicity that were hostile whenever i was on the board, and really specific things about my appearance he disliked about me. i quickly became erratic whenever i was on the board and hypersensitive to the types of posts i would see.

the breaking point was when i started reading things that i knew i never disclosed to him. very personal things and private matters with people in my life i had written about in a google doc started showing up in posts he made. at this point in time, he was aware of my first name and the school i attended, and unfortunately, my email was simply my first and last name.

i put two and two together and realized that my login credentials somehow were breached. financial information, my addresses, messages between family members, other social media i used, private personal info, browsing history - all this information was available to someone who i never shared account logins with. it correlated with the type of info he would include in his posts. all they needed was my name. perhaps it could have been a phishing link but im unsure. when i searched my email for leaked data breaches, it showed up as being one of the emails leaked. i strongly suspect this could have been how it was available to him.

i wanted to write this down because i still cant quite make sense of why he did the things he did. there's not that much evidence as to his behavior which is why its so insidious. i strongly suspect he uses imageboards and /soc/ to find people to do this type of thing to, and i think he did it to others as well. i am extremely paranoid of people these days.

please make sure to turn on two factor authentication for any private accounts you have, this includes your icloud. make sure your email isnt included in any data breaches. you can turn on notifications if they do appear, like the site haveibeenpwned. if someone has your email account, particularly your google account, extremely personal data as the aforementioned is immediately available to them if your login credentials become involved in a data breach. in my case i used a consistent password and this led to them being able to access multiple accounts of mine.

make sure to use a quality antivirus and turn on your firewall. and lastly, be wary of what you share with others on the internet. lots of personal data couldve been secure if i had been more wary of the type of people i was talking to.

whats insidious is this person was very kind to me for the first few months. i didnt chalk them as the type of person to do that sort of thing until it was too late. they were intelligent, intelligent enough to know my vulnerabilities and hack into my accounts. not every online person who seems harmless, even for the first few months, is someone you can trust. there are people who derive pleasure from doing this type of thing to others. if you are on imageboards, the likelihood is that you are already pretty lonely and perhaps will be more susceptible to the type of emotional manipulation these people use.

be cautious. dont trust people just because they know how to make you feel "good." trust people who demonstrate moral character. navigate online communities, particularly ones with mentally ill/unwell members, with caution and awareness. dont be an idiot like me.

sorry if this is not worded well. this has really worn me mentally and emotionally. i havent eaten much in days and i think its affected my cognition a lot. i feel pretty drained but i wanted to write this down somewhere because i feel incredibly alone with everything ive been through.

theres not enough documentation, and frankly i dont want this being a major part of my life, so i have to stomach a lot of this in private. i wanted to post this somewhere as a warning. perhaps ill come back to this post later but i likely wont. i just needed to say this somewhere to get it off my chest and feel like i warned others.

again sorry if this is written badly. i may rewrite for more details if i am in a heathier stage in my life and feel like this post isnt adequate. if anyone else has been through similar things, please know youre not alone. thats all i wanted to say, thanks for reading.