When I was thirteen, my friend Ryan showed me a website that claimed it could predict when and how people would die.
The domain name was just a random string of letters and numbers – one of those basic HTML sites with no logo, no branding, just a plain white page with a single headline:
Find out when and how you’ll die… if you dare!
It asked for your name, birthday, height, weight, ethnicity, whether you smoked or exercised, and a few other dumb questions like that. I snorted and told Ryan it was stupid.
“Dude, it’s just guessing,” I said.
Ryan grinned and showed me his text from the site.
Death Date: August 12th, 2094
Cause: Old age
We laughed about it for a few minutes and moved on. But later that night, when I was home alone, boredom got the better of me, and I texted Ryan asking for the link.
I filled in my answers and hit submit. A minute later my phone buzzed.
Death Date: March 3rd, 2087
Cause: Heart attack
Interesting.
I typed in a bunch of my friends’ names too, out of curiosity. All the results were decades away. One said car accident, another said cancer.
At first I shrugged it off. But as I stared at my ceiling at night alone in my room, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Being the gullible thirteen year old I was, I started Googling things like “heart problems symptoms.”
Of course, I knew the website had to be guessing, I told myself. There was no way some random page on the internet could predict how you’d die. Still, once the thought was in my head, it was hard to shake.
I started noticing things I normally wouldn’t have paid attention to.
If my chest felt tight after running up the stairs, I wondered if that meant something. If my heart started beating faster after a scary video or a stressful test at school, I’d stop for a second and listen to it, counting the beats in my head.
For the next few days, the thought kept creeping back into my mind at random moments. I would lie in bed at night listening to my heartbeat, but eventually the fear faded. After all, the date it gave me was seventy years in the future.
Little did I know, what I really should’ve been worried about had nothing to do with my heart.
And it wasn’t seventy years away either – it was about to hit me right around the corner.
A few months later, two police officers knocked on our door. At first I thought they had the wrong house, until they asked for me by name.
They told my parents one of my classmates, Julie, had almost been kidnapped.
Apparently she’d been texting an older man online who found her on Facebook for a few weeks, and she thought he was a teenage boy from another school. He had planned to pick her up and take her to his house. She was safe, thankfully, and the man was arrested.
But after he was taken into custody, they found something disturbing on his computer…
A spreadsheet with thousands of names belonging to children under 18.
I began feeling light headed when they explained where his list came from.
The “death prediction” website wasn’t predicting anything. The form had been collecting data – birthdays, height, weight, ethnicity… and full names.
Any entries with a birth date showing they were under eighteen was added to the spreadsheet. And anyone willing to give away all that information on a random website was marked as an easy target.
The list had been sold online to predators.
The officers told us the site had since been shut down and the people running it were caught. But before they left, one of them asked if I had ever used the site. My hands started shaking.
I admitted that I had, and that I had entered some of my friends’ names too…
Including Julie’s.
The officer nodded slowly.
“Thank you,” he said, “that helped us identify the source of the list.”
But that definitely didn’t make me feel better. After all, if something more had happened, I don’t know how I’d live with myself knowing I was the cause.
I’m in my twenties now, and I still think about that website sometimes.
About how easily we gave away information when we were kids. How something that looked like a dumb internet game was actually a trap.
Every time I remember typing their names into that form, I remember how predators had that gotten that spreadsheet with all our details on it because of me.
Some probably still have it saved somewhere on their computers to this day, all because thirteen year old me thought it would be a great idea to find out how we would die.
Turns out it was just helping them decide who to target first.
submitted by /u/TwistedUrbanTales
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