To ask what the strangest thing you did online as a teenager was?

[Username73638]

I’ll go first… when I was about 12 or 13 (mid-00s) I signed up to a UK mum/baby forum - I can’t remember what it was called but it was a bit like Mumsnet but way, way smaller, everyone knew everyone - and created a whole fake life and made a load of ‘friends’ on there who were presumably women in their 20s-40s. This was when the internet was a very different place and everyone had their kids’ names and DOBs on ‘tickers’ I think they were called in their signatures. There was minimal anonymity. I had a fake husband and a couple of fake kids with names and back stories and then ‘got pregnant’ and tracked a whole pregnancy and birth. All of my online ‘friends’ were really excited to hear the birth announcement and helped me pick the baby’s name. I made up a fake birth story. There was actually an in-person meet up with all the kids that I was invited along to but obviously I couldn’t go, I pretended that one of my kids was sick.

I still remember some of the names of the women and their kids and think about how old the kids would be now (in their 20s!)

Anyway after 1-2 years, can’t remember exactly how long, a group of them realised I was fake and ‘confronted’ me online. I didn’t confess but deleted my account and never went back.

I had a difficult home life and I think I wanted to imagine the happy family I might have when I grew up. It was a bit of an obsession though and I spent so many hours on there, basically every afternoon and evening after school. I’ve never done anything similar since, my catfishing days were over after that!

Did anyone else do anything similar online as a teenager, pretending to be anyone else or something?

Walking down to the phone box with a handful of 2p coins was the nearest to "online" when I was a teen

I also did loads of fake personas on websites as a teenager!

It3s all a bit apple cider vinegar

Late teens/early 20s I did meet up with one or two older guys from the internet - with no romantic intend on my side - who, while they did luckily take no for an answer, made me slightly uncomfortable.

Born 1970 - we used to ring a Mr Zebedee from the phone book with our emergency 2p and shout ‘time for bed … boing’ down the phone

heady days!

AOL chat rooms were the place to be for a fake persona.

And Yy to getting all your pshe info from Graham Torringtons late night love before then.

blimey it’s a wonder I have managed any functional adult relationships at all 🤣

I remember calling 100 for the Operator in the 80s to ask who sang Goodness Gracious Me because my boyfriend and I couldn't remember. It was Peter Sellers. Now we would Google it.

A/S/L?

Me too re CB radios! Prank telephone calls too.

How did they realise you were fake, what gave you away?

I was only 11 when we got our first computer me & my friends used to go on random chat rooms having cyber sex with a load
of weirdos. Every time my mum came in the room we used to the monitor off so she couldn’t see what we were up to 😆

@Anon501178 he still presents in Boom Radio! What a voice!

Me and my best friend would use her dad's Packard Bell (amazing pc) to go on chat rooms, pretend we were older, add the creepy much older men on msn then screenshot them wanking off and send it to their family (if we could find them)

I don't know why but we thought we were doing a good service.

Handbag.com.. Met my soul mate. 25 years later and he's still on my mind every single day.

Well, it wasn't around back in the 70s and 80s when I was a child but I certainly made the most of it when it finally arrived!

I remember using the search engine 'Ask Jeeves' for the first time. Must have been over 25 years ago give or take. Was paralysed with what to type so just typed 'Russian amputees' and somehow stumbled across some dating site for Russians who were missing limbs.

I pretended to be Miley Cyrus and would send my daughter - who was a big fan! - emails of encouragement from Hannah Montana. Oh and I set up a Facebook account pretending to be Simon Cowell ... would regularly be sent messages from literally hundreds of fans.

I also spent time on some weird chat room and was amazed to be able to tap some keys and make handcuffs on the screen!

These days, I have a following online as myself of over 250,000 people (no, not famous!) so you could say the internet has worked out ok for me

Reading this is actually freaky because I did the exact same thing as you as a teenager. Sitting there on my family computer and was pretending to have a whole family/ new baby - even down to the meet up that I couldn't attend. I can remember all the names too. It was on a site called Babyzone.

I was going through a difficult time (parent was ill the eventually died) so was a form of escapism I guess.

So weird that someone else did the exact same as me - I wonder how common it actually was.

Oh I have such strong memories of realising how revolutionary it all was! It seemed SO exciting, the idea that you could go looking for stuff on a computer that wasn't anywhere near you.

I don’t actually know, but seeing as I was a child barely older than some of their own kids I assume it was pretty obvious by the things I wrote 🤣 I actually judge them a bit for not working it out sooner. The only reason I remember them giving was that I was ‘online’ so often I couldn’t possibly have time to be raising 3 kids or if I was I was a terrible mother 😅 Bear in mind this was before smart phones so you actually had to be sat at a computer at home to be on the forum. Although I always thought it was a little rich coming from them because some of them were on there all the time too!

Wow that’s crazy 😳 Sorry to hear about your parent ❤️

Did you meet in real life? I had a very boring job in my early 20s and got slightly addicted to handbag.com! As a teenager I used to enjoy making up fake personas in chat rooms. My favourite was pretending to be a professional ballerina. I also used to call 100 the operator on New Year’s Eve to wish them a happy new year, they’d always say thank you!

Yeah, no such thing as internet in my teenage years. Most "outrageous" thing we'd do is use the local telephone box to ring a random number and start talking to whoever answered as though they were our mum or dad. We probably confused a fair amount of people. Quite lame really compared to what some get/got up to.

Used to go on Omegle video, and end chats quickly until we found a cock to laugh at. Remember once there wasn’t a person just sort of PowerPoint slides with ‘thumbs up for 1 point’ until it progressed to flash your boobs etc. Probably made some pervert very happy.

I think I was 17 when I first joined mumsnet after my mam read out a funny thread to me which is pretty odd too. I also remember answering questions on yahoo answers with completely unearned authority, logged in to my account a few years ago and I spouted so much shite

Online? 😄😄As a teen my evening entertainment was a 1/2 mile walk to the nearest phone box so I could talk to my mates. We had a cunning ruse whereby they (mostly had phones at home) would make a collect call to me in the phone box, so I didn't have to pay, and it wouldn't run up their parent's phone bill.

@ShillyShallySherbet We met many times. In retrospect, it could have been a very dangerous disaster waiting to happen but I was lucky.

I joined an American forum called something like Motherhood that was very early crunchy/gentle parenting/homesteady and enjoying making up crazy names for my 8 children that I'd birthed at home in between churning butter and tending to chickens (as a 14 year old in a council house in Birmingham )
I never sustained any of these personas for very long though before starting again!