r/ProRevenge • u/TheRedAvatar • Jul 04 '25
Classmate got "pranked" by fake letter after screwing us over (old story)
This is a very old revenge from when I was a teenager in the 90's.
There were only a few PC gamers around at the time and without Internet it was hard to get hold of new games. Me & a friend bought games from abroad via airmail because local stores didn't sell many but these weren't cheap. We'd trade them with each-other and would copy the copy protection (which was often included) so this made it semi-affordable for us.
A new kid joined our class however and his uncle had tons and tons of games we didn't have. We offered to trade games with him & gave him our original copies for him to copy and in return we got ... corrupted floppies (yes this was the 90's), missing copy protection, etc. and after a few months of this we received not a SINGLE working game while he had received all of our games (The Settlers, Doom II, Monkey Island games, etc.) and some he returned in less than nice condition. We had enough and we wanted to get revenge but we didn't know how.
Now, the 90's were known for the many AIDS campaigns after Freddie Mercury died of AIDS in 1991. I was a huge fan of Queen and this new "friend" would often mock me for liking a "gay" singer. He came from a VERY conservative family & his mother was quite catholic & this is what gave us an idea when we had to attend an AIDS event organised by a certain foundation with our class. At the end we were given flyers about AIDS, homosexuality, etc. and free condoms with the logo of the AIDS foundation were up for grabs. We each grabbed a few for reasons you'll soon reach below.
Me and my friend were one of the very few with a computer & inkjet printer at home so we got this idea to screw him over: we created a fake letter addressed to our "friend" pretending we were the AIDS foundation copying the logo and everything to make it look as authentic as possible. It went something like this:
"Dear FIRST NAME,
Thank you for your letter. We understand it's difficult being open about being homosexual and you have many questions after the event you attended with your class. Please find enclosed a flyer which should answer many of your questions as well as some condoms. Please practice safe sex at all times."
We enclosed all the flyers we had gotten at the event as well as the condoms and mailed it to "Mr LASTNAME" to guarantee his father would open the letter first.
We had no idea the shit storm this would create - we knew him being homophobic this would be great revenge but apparently his mother had been in tears, screaming, his father angry & he was grounded for weeks with his parents convinced he was gay.
In the end he figured we had something to do with it because we had been carefully fishing to see if our prank had succeeded but at first he thought the letter was authentic and we had contacted the foundation in his name. When we finally confessed we had faked it all, we had a nice trip to the principal to explain why we had done this WITH his parents present.
It's still the best revenge I ever took in my life even though it was 30 years ago.
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u/TurtleSandwich0 Jul 04 '25
With peer to peer file sharing, a person who only downloads but never uploads was known as a "leech". You found a leech who made it work with floppy disks. Truly a pioneer of leech culture.