We Asked Women How Far They’ll Go to Creep Someone Online

One time I was walking down the street when this dude was jogging past me and stopped to ask me out. While I wasn’t particularly interested, I took down his number. Still, my curiosity was piqued enough that I went home and spent a chunk of time that I’ll never get back searching the dark crevices of the internet to find his profile.

All I knew about him was his first name, that he was from Calgary, lived down the street from me and was a jogger.

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Dead set on deciding whether or not I should text him, I knew that his profile would alert me to any red flags—you know, like sexist and/or racist viewpoints, a subpar sense of style, children, or a significant other.

Long story short, I found nothing and didn’t text him because my lack of knowledge about him just solidified my original lack of interest.

Even though you’re judging me right now, we all know I’m hardly the only one who’s put some effort into creeping. As children of the internet, we millennials grew up mastering the ins and outs of social media, and most of us can summon very specific personal information about someone with just a few taps.

Almost every interaction we have nowadays involves some sort of online digging. If you have a job interview, you find your interviewees on LinkedIn. If you want to find out if your crush is single, you retrieve their Facebook and dissect their profile photos. If you meet someone on Tinder, you swim to the depths of the internet to confirm they’re not a serial killer.

While those former cases can be beneficial and fun, sometimes, like the latter case, creeping can be essential for safety.

As such, it’s very easy to get carried away. But after asking around, it seems like I am on the lower end of the creeping scale.

Katie*

To be a good creep, you don’t need skill. You just need perseverance and motivation. I creep guys because I am inherently a nosey person and I want the full picture.

Like, if you really like a guy and you think he’s super cool, but then you find his Instagram and he turns out to be a bro and he ‘gram’s pictures of Playboy models in bikinis, that’s a hard no.

One time it took me two hours to find this hot bouncer when all I had was his first name. Everyone said I wouldn’t be able to find him but I set out to do it.

I Facebooked the bar and his name, and nothing came up. I looked in the tagged photos of the bar’s Instagram page, nothing. So then, I looked up the manager of the bar’s Facebook, looked through his friends list and crept all of the people also worked at the bar.

I finally found him when he commented on someone’s post. The thing was, he’d already asked for my phone number, so I had his real contact information. I just wanted more. And we never went out.

The only bad thing is when you know too much and then you forget what they’ve told you versus what you found out on your own. One time I was seeing this guy and I had found his LinkedIn. I knew he had worked for a fast food joint so I asked him how it was, and he was just like, “How do you know that?” I forgot he didn’t tell me that so I made up an excuse about how every youth has worked in a fast food restaurant. He bought it.

Colleen

Back in my first year of university when I was bored with life, I would go on Omegle. Basically on this site, you meet random people to talk to, for whatever reason.

So I met this guy who lived in South Carolina and I only knew his first name. We would talk here and there and he would always flirt with me.

He was almost 30 though, so I thought this was a little shady. All I knew was he was an arborist, so he cut down trees for a living. So I Googled all the arborist companies within his city that he told me he lived in and found their Facebook pages. Eventually, I found a tagged photo of him, and then I found out he had a girlfriend.

I’m good at creeping people though because I pick up on clues. Like, if I need to find someone’s Instagram page but I don’t have them on Facebook, I will first find their Facebook account, see what friends they have, try to find those friends on Instagram, and then go through those friends’ followers and following. Eventually I’ll find their username.

Or on Tinder, when you’re swiping through a guy’s photos and you catch glimpses of stuff they might be into, you can get that info and cross-examine. For example, if you see a picture of them with any logos in the picture, that could be associated with a school they went to or a place they work at. Then you kind of just go through those Facebook pages.

Michelle

I’ve found the personal profiles of all of the guys I’ve ever had a significant conversation with on Tinder. If there was a guy that I was talking to for a while, like a week or two, I would creep them to decide if I would meet up with him. And I would literally do everything to find them.

With the first guy that I ever really got intimate with on Tinder, he didn’t even have his last name on Facebook—he used his middle name. But I did end up finding him. He told me that he lived in Oshawa, so I searched “From Oshawa, Ontario and Lives in Waterloo, Ontario” because that’s where he went to school.

Honestly, it seems like a lot of work but it’s not that hard. Everything online is connected to your Facebook account or through your Gmail account. If you have either one of those you’re set. And when we’re creating new social channels, we’re not really making new usernames. It’s all connected.

My full-time job now actually involves social media for a brand, and one of things we do is find local influences for the brand. And in order to find those groups, I do the same thing. My boss is like, how are you so good at this? It’s because I’m crazy.

Jasmine

I work at a bank in the marketing department and a friend of mine is in the call centre. She saw some guy on the phone one day and thought he was cute but didn’t know his name.

So she walked past him and saw a username on his computer while he was checking Instagram, so that’s what she gave me. It was a private Instagram so I had no idea who he was. All I knew was that he was “sort of Egyptian,” she told me.

All I had was the little display picture on his username. So I put his username into Google and I found Twitter replies to an account that doesn’t exist anymore. But I found out his full name was David Aziz*. Alright cool. So I crept the people who were tweeting him to find their names and put their names into Facebook.

I went through the mutual friends of the people who were tweeting him and checked all the David, Dave’s, anything with the name Aziz in it. I had all of them on separate tabs.

Finally, I narrowed it down to three. One of them had a different first name, but said he’d gone to a high school near us. I sent the profiles to my friend, and she couldn’t tell because she literally only walked past this guy once.

So, I made a whole new Instagram with fake people’s pictures and followed this guy, just so I could get the real pictures on the private Instagram. And it turned out it was him.

Laura

One of my friends was on the curling team in high school and when she was at a tournament, she saw this guy that she thought was really cute. She didn’t know his name, just the school that he went to so she told me because I’m the one in my friend group who always creeps people’s Instagrams and stuff.

So I went on Facebook and looked up the page for that school’s curling team. She told me he was tall, had brown hair and he wore this jersey number. In the page’s photos, there was one picture of a guy who matched this description, so I went to his profile and he had pictures of curling so I put two and two together. I sent my friend a picture of it and then I found his ask.fm page on his Facebook.

Through that, I found a bunch of questions and answers that people sent him, like as specific as what tattoo he would want if he ever got one. I actually wrote down everything about him, and I printed it off and gave it to my friend as a birthday gift.

Meanwhile on his Facebook, I found his whole family, including family photos. Once I got to the point where I was looking at pictures of him at Christmas, I figured it was getting weird.

It’s so addicting, I love to see what people do on their spare time. I think it starts off just wanting to see what the guy looks like, and then once I know I can find that, I just want to see what else I can get. It’s an adrenaline rush.

Lamees

I’ve done some pretty weird shit, like, I’m really good at stalking. Once I saw this barista at the Starbucks near my university and he was really cute but he didn’t have a nametag on. So I would always stare at him thinking, wow you are some kind of delicious. I had to know who he was.

I just started going through my friends’ friend lists, hoping someone would know this guy or that his picture would pop up. It didn’t, so I went to my university Spotted page to see if anyone else found him cute too. I didn’t find anything, but I saw that another barista who goes to my school had commented on someone’s post. She worked at the same location so I went on her profile and I was going through her friends when I saw a girl with him in the picture.

I went on her profile and her profile photo was public and he was tagged in it. That’s how I found him.

So then I made a fake Facebook account. I made her some super fresh off the boat, just arrived from Pakistan, girl. I was just too scared to tell him that I thought he was really cute myself because what the heck am I supposed to say if he reads that and then serves me my next drink?

I messaged him saying, “OMG hi, I’m always at Starbucks with my friends and I think you’re so cute. Can you give me a chance?” He didn’t respond.

So I kept messaging him like, “You’re so cute, why won’t you reply?” When I saw the notification that it was seen, I wrote, “I know you saw this.” He just replied with a lowercase “lol.”

At that point, I was like, alright, this isn’t even worth it anymore.

*Names have been changed.

Follow Ebony-Renee Baker on Twitter.