Everyone loves a good practical joke, even if you’re the one getting duped. But sometimes people can take a prank bit too far. Sometimes the prank can be downright diabolical, leading to emotional wounds that last for decades to come. Here are real-life stories depicting some of the cruelest, most thoughtless jokes that you could ever think of.
1. Fake Winner
I'm friends with a couple where the husband did the 'fake winner' lottery ticket thing to his wife. Then, three years later, she got the ultimate revenge: she quietly replaced the real tickets he put in her stocking with her own 'fake winner' tickets. She scratched them off, and then ripped up a $50,000 'winner' in front of him, claiming he must be playing that stupid joke on her again.
He pannicked badly, grabbed the pieces of the tickets, put them back together, saw it was a 'winner', and proceeded to freak out. He went onto Google, researched if ripped-up lottery tickets could be redeemed, and cried. She let it run to the absolute end where he went to call some number on the back and saw the "novelty" text.
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2. Cold Hearted To The Core
I'll never forget it. A buddy and I were on a double date of sorts though I was mainly wingin' it for him. The gal I was with (let's call her K) shared a heartbreaking story she thought was hilarious. In high school, K and her fellow cheerleaders invited the most ostracized girl in their class to a party as a joke. She said the girl was overjoyed and couldn't believe it.
She was dirt poor, though. She ends up buying a new pair of overpriced jeans for the party and it's obvious. She shows up with some of the tags still on them because she'll have to return them the next day. The cheerleaders notice and begin to plot. The four of us are sitting at dinner as K continues to relate what happened, laughing in fits:
Someone had spilled an entire glass of red in a loveseat at the party. K immediately sits down opposite the spill and beckons the poor girl to sit down next to her to chat. She does and immediately ruins the overpriced jeans. Everyone laughs as she runs out the door in tears. K casually finished the story as a sizable lump formed in my throat.
Sometimes, it's the small, sharp cruelties that cut deepest.
3. Locker Laughs
In Grade 6, I opened my locker and a note from the boy I had a crush on fell out saying he liked me too. A bunch of girls in my grade were there and they were super happy for me, or I thought they were. When I went to the boy to ask him about it he said he didn’t write it and the group of girls who were there when I found the note had written it.
I turned around and sure enough, they’re laughing. But it crushed me, not that the boy didn’t like me back but because I didn’t think these girls I’d gone to school with since first grade were that mean. A couple of weeks later the group played a similar joke on one of the girls who was actually in on the prank against me, and I got a genuine apology from her after she realized how bad I must have felt.
None of the other girls ever apologized.
4. This Is Animalistic
Putting an end to the life of a farmer’s cow as some sick joke. The cow was not a meat cow either. It was the farmer’s beloved pet and he fed it and played with the friendly cow every day. The farmer sued the kids who got rid of the cow and he won tens of thousands of dollars for emotional upset. The cow was an old bull. It was the most friendly cow I have ever seen.
It was not even neutered and had really big horns and loved sitting next to the farmer and just graze next to him. To be fair, the kids did not necessarily kill the cow, but forced the old bull to walk upstairs. Cows can walk upstairs, but their anatomy is not built for it, and it’s extremely painful for them to do so. The old bull broke its front left leg and bellowed in pain for 10 minutes.
The farmer had no choice but to shoot the pet that he has had for the last eight years right then and there on the stairs. The kids pled not guilty in court but they were forced to pay for it all. The bull was a Texas longhorn, common in some areas but rare where we both lived. It was really sad to see the bull gone from the farm.
I was neighbors with the farmer and he would always invite me over to play with the animals and feed them and everything.
5. A Bad Call
I have no idea what radio station this was on as I was only a kid, but they used to do prank phone calls. I have little to no recollection of many of them except this one, but even as a kid I could tell it was just terribly wrong. The radio host rang up a woman and told her that he was the manager of her husband's company. He said he was very sorry to tell her that he had been involved in an accident with some heavy machinery and it had resulted in mortal injuries. Her response was heartbreaking.
As you would expect the woman was beside herself with being told her husband had just passed, she was wailing on the phone and the radio host couldn't get another word in to explain it was a joke. Then they just cut off the phone call and played a song. Even as a kid I knew it was a really stupid and cruel idea, and I'm pretty sure that was the last time they did a 'prank' phone call.
6. The Epilogue Is The Best Part...
In high school, one of the cutest girls in my grade came up to me and told me she had a crush on me and wanted to go out on a date. I was skeptical because no one had ever asked me out before, but I was growing into my body pretty well and more attractive than I was as an early teen so I just figured puberty was doing some good work for me.
We were 16 or 17 and had both just got our licenses so she said she'd meet me at the movie theatre and we'd go have dinner after the movie. I told my mom and she got all excited and helped me pick out an outfit and took pictures of me before my first ever date. I went and got a haircut and my car detailed so I’d be rolling fresh, you know.
Believe me, I was looking tasty with a fresh shave, hair edged up sharp enough to cut glass, I was dripped out before the phrase even existed. So I show up at the theatre a couple of minutes early and I’m waiting for her and after like 15 minutes I think maybe I'll call her to make sure she didn’t have an emergency come up or something (we didn’t have texting back then). Boy, was I in for the saddest revelation ever.
So I call her and she answers on speakerphone and like five other girls are all laughing at me saying things like "Hahaha he showed up" So yeah, it was all just a prank to hurt my feelings. Jokes on me I guess. I’m 29 now, so the wound has more than healed. As far as I know, the goal of the "prank" was just to see if I believed her to hurt my feelings as punishment for not being cool enough, I suppose.
I’m still not cool at all, but it works for me. Nerds are in fashion these days. Instead of going home, I ended up seeing The Dark Knight by myself and, as you all know, that movie is awesome. By the time Heath Ledger was doing his "scars" monologue, I had forgotten why I was upset.
I then had dinner for one at Red Robin which also was absolute fire. I think I got a jalapeno burger. I told the waitress I got stood up and she told me I was very handsome and I think about that compliment at least once a month. When I told mom what happened she called the girl "stupid” threatened to stab her and then bought me a PS3. As far as I know, no stabbing took place.
Last I remember, the girl in question ended up preggers and missed high school graduation. I have no idea where she is now, but hopefully, she becomes a better person and has a positive impact on those around her and her son or daughter is happy and well raised. I’ve dated plenty of people since then and I’m in a happy and healthy relationship now with proper communication and respect for each other.
The car was a 1992 Jeep Cherokee and it sucks but last I saw it, it still ran and the guy I sold it to ended up modding it out for off-roading, so even the car got a good ending.
7. A Neighbor’s Revenge
A prank contest was going on in between two houses that were next to each other in San Diego, CA circa 2014. My cousin lived in one of the houses and this happened when I went to visit him a few years back. House #1 pulled a prank that led to a member in House #2 being late for his first day of work. It was collateral damage but the guy ended up getting fired for it.
The guy who lost his job came home furious. He then took a 15-pound medicine ball and painted it to look just like a soccer ball. His plan was diabolical. He tossed the medicine ball into the front yard of House #1 and waited. When he saw the guy come out of the house he yells, "Hey 'Josh' can you kick that ball back over here?"
The dude proceeds to take a running start and square up and kick the "soccer ball" with every ounce of strength he had. The poor guy went down almost immediately in tears and screaming. Ended up breaking three bones in his right foot. Just brutal.
8. Manipulation And Malice
When I was 17, my parents moved the family a couple of states away. I broke up with my (then) girlfriend because at 17 you don't do the long-distance thing. A week after we got settled into our new house, my (then ex) girlfriend called me and said that she was pregnant. It was plausible but unlikely as I had worn a rubber.
So I believed her and rode Greyhound buses for 36 hours to go back and be with her, whatever the outcome might be. And being young and stupid, I proposed. Her parents took me in (reluctantly, which is understandable). My (then ex-ex) girlfriend and I moved into their finished basement apartment in preparation for the blessed event. But that's when things got weird...
A couple of weeks later, she refused to have anyone go with her to her "pregnancy doctor." A week later, she didn't want to have intercourse for a whole week. A week or so after that, her mom started asking why she wasn't "showing" at all, why there were no doctor bills, etc. Then it all came out: she had been lying to get me to come back and be with her.
Angry words were exchanged. We re-broke up. Oddly enough, her parents took my side and were super kind to me. They kicked my (now ex-ex-ex) girlfriend upstairs to her room for a week and let me stay in their basement while we worked things out. And when it was painfully obvious that there would be no wedding, they bought me an airline ticket home.
My dad summed it up when I got home: "Well at least you got out of mowing lawns for the summer." I hold no grudge against this girl, and I was only angry at her for a little while. We made up before my leaving and parted as friends.
9. Plan Backfired
My mom was a teacher and sitting in her room she heard a loud THUMP and felt a shake. She went running to see what it was and found out an explosive device had gone off in the room nearby, and a student had been caught in the blast. She comforted the student who said, "I just picked it up and it exploded." The school was closed (obviously), and there was a big investigation.
My mom was first on the scene and she was questioned about the student. It turns out the student my mom comforted was the one who set the explosive device. Because he hadn't gotten a major project done, somehow he convinced himself the best way to get out of it was to blow up all the other projects. I don't know if the student was seriously hurt but he was expelled.
This was in the late 1980s, so explosives were either very uncommon or believed uncommon. Plus, there had been a related threat earlier in the day, so when my mom heard the boom, she thought "Oh God, it went off." The bomber was the only injury and that's why the detective knew that he was the perp because it was an amateur device.
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10. Take A Seat
I was visiting a friend at his apartment when I noticed a vintage chair next to the dumpster and fell in love. I was insanely poor at the time and jumped at the opportunity to have a nice chair for my apartment. I asked my friend if I could store it at his place for the night because I couldn't fit it into my tiny beater car. He said it was fine and helped me bring it to his covered back porch.
It was one of those upholstered highback chairs with the fancy arms...like a reading chair, I guess. I returned the next day with my mother's truck and brought the chair home to clean it up. As I was scrubbing it in the back yard I noticed that it was much dirtier than I'd realized but I spent hours cleaning it anyway. The next time my friends were over I proudly showed them the chair and everyone looked super uncomfortable then burst out laughing.
It turns out that my friend's wife disliked me and convinced a bunch of the guys to urinate all over the chair the night I left it at their apartment. They thought it was hilarious that I'd spent so long cleaning it with my bare hands and how funny it was that I would put trash in my house. I didn't find it very funny and we are no longer friends.
11. Sneaky Recording
In college, at the end of the year, a club I was in had a "roast" of the outgoing seniors. My friend running the roast couldn't come up with anything for one of the guys, let's call him Ben. To drum up ideas, he called a bunch of Ben's close friends (also in the club) and asked them for things to make fun of Ben about. It went horribly wrong.
Thinking this was a confidential conversation, they proceed to lay into Ben: "the guy is seriously lame" and "honestly, when I'm talking to a girl and he is there, it is supremely awkward." My friend simply recorded that whole conversation and played it outright for Ben's section of the roast—mortifying Ben and all his friends simultaneously.
12. A Bucket Of Mean
I remember when the ALS challenge was popular I read an article about a "prank" played on a special needs high schooler. These kids told him it was just water in the bucket, but it was also urine, butts, all sorts of disgusting things. But that wasn't even the worst part. They decided to put the video all over the internet...as though the bucket wasn't enough.
13. I’m The Cruel One Here
My brother thought he was home alone and was loudly gaming with his online friends. He was irking me so I snuck around the house and gathered supplies: my dad’s work jacket, a random creepy mask, and my brother’s BB. I positioned myself in a room on the landing next to his, scratched a bit so he’d come out of his room.
He jokingly said, “If I’m not back in five minutes call the Sherrif!” Poised at the ready, I couldn't wait for him to see me in my terrifying getup. Cue him seeing me decked out, pointing a BB at him from behind a doorway. He freaked, screamed and ran back into his room rather than down the stairs and started sobbing. I mean he thought he was dead for sure.
I thought it was hilarious at the time but it’s been about eight years and I feel nothing but guilt when I think about it. The only kind of funny thing is wondering what his friend thought was going on.
14. This Is Unhealthy
My dad told me that when he was a kid, a “friend” of his gave him a glass of lemonade—it was drain cleaner mixed with something else and my dad vomited for hours. Thankfully he survived and went on to have kids, but his vocal cords were never the same.
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15. Mall Misfortune
My so-called 'friends' had my mom drop me off at a mall and we 'hang out' until nearing my bedtime. Mind you this was back when there were pagers, no smartphones, so I asked my friends when we are going back home because my mom has talked to their mothers about someone dropping me off at home. My parents both worked.
Anyways they decided to tell me that their mom will pick them up from this door and I should go ahead of them. They left and I was a 12-year-old lost kid in a mall with no parent. Luckily one of the male students from my school was there and saw me and was like, “What’re you doing out so late?” I just broke down crying.
I just blabbered everything that happened and he told me to wait until he found a phone and paged my dad while calling his mom and telling her what happened. Needless to say, they got a frantic father going about what happened and the girls said they told their mom that I saw my uncle and left with him, so my parents has thought I was kidnapped.
But there is a happy ending: The boy who saved me and I became best of friends.
16. Went Over Like A Lead Balloon
I was a huge Led Zeppelin fan growing up, and obviously, my dad knows this. One day I got a message from him saying he had just met Robert Plant in a shop and Plant had invited me to come to sit in for a studio session. I was naturally super excited and told some of my friends about it. I couldn’t wait. An hour later, my dad told me he had made it all up. He’s done worse things, but this one still cuts deep because of how mean-spirited and unnecessary it was.
17. Sick In The Head
I had a friend who faked his demise. To this day, I don't trust him when he says he had health issues, because he had us all worried sick for weeks, saying he was having heart surgery on "X" day. The day of the surgery, I woke up to find a post on his socials from his "dad" saying that he passed and that he was so scared before going under and now he wanted one last message.
It was an April Fools Day joke. I was so angry. No one was laughing cause this was not a short message it was five paragraphs long and I was crying when I got to the message. I still don't fully trust him and honestly remembering it makes me even angrier.
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18. A Tasteless Post
My father-in-law made a “prank” post on Facebook a few years ago saying both his daughters-in-law were pregnant at once and he was so excited! Except neither of us was and I had scheduled our appointment for infertility treatment three days prior. My sister-in-law had to explain to her elderly grandmother that she wasn’t pregnant and when she was, it wouldn’t be found out from a FB post.
That kind of post is always in poor taste, but to do it to someone you’re related to, and to whom you didn’t even give a heads up? Ugh.
19. Innocent Question?
I was 14 and going out to eat with my first girlfriend and my mom at Jimboys. Just like 90% of 14-year-old males, I suffered from acne pretty badly. We were eating and having a good time and out of nowhere my mom looks at my girlfriend and asks, "Do you like popping zits?" My eyes widened, she knew I was horrified by her question. My girlfriend just got quiet and her face went red.
She then proceeds to say, "What? It not like she can't see them, and you need someone to do something about them." She then laughed and then got mad no one else thought it was funny and ruined the rest of the evening. I could never understand doing something like that to my child.
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20. Delete Devastation
I remember one where a girlfriend deleted a man's like 10-15 year effort NBA2k team. The moment he found out was so sad—I'll never forget it...He sits down and buries his face in his hands and just says, "Babe, you don't understand, I cannot get that back." The girlfriend legitimately thought there was some way to undelete it.
21. Erasing The Past
A bunch of roommates, when one went on vacation, changed the locks and plastered over the door of his room. When he came back they pretended not to know him, denied he ever lived there, and when he wanted to show them his room there was just a blank wall where the door used to be. They kept this up for three days.
22. “The Nastiest Prank I’ve Seen”
A friend of a friend in high school had her boyfriend pretend that he'd passed. He had one of his friends call her saying he had succumbed to injuries sustained in a car accident and had someone else calling up pretending to be a doctor from the hospital. She was upset. Later that day, after she kept asking the fake doctor which hospital it was so she could be there, she found out it was all prank to "see if she cared."
Horrible. Anyway, they broke up. To this day it's the nastiest prank I've seen in person.
23. Why Would Anyone Do This?
Derren Brown. English illusionist. Did a TV show a few years ago. Long story short, he convinced a young lad who had got intoxicated the night before that he had ended the life of a girl. They set him up so bad. Psychologically, it looked like they had broken this poor lad. They had set up actors, a set, and fake detectives.
They made the lad so convinced that he had ended someone’s life, that he handed himself in to the fake constable’s station and admitted to the act. I’ll never forget the one tear trickling down this kid’s face in the devastation at what he thought he had done. Then Derren Brown appears from behind a screen like “surprise!”.
It was cruel and has stuck with me for a long time.
24. A Close Call
In high school, someone made an explosive device and sneakily threw it into a metal trash can. One of my friends unknowingly walked by when it exploded and blew out his eardrum. The trash can looked like a peeled banana afterward. That person was ratted out and expelled. The kid was taken into custody afterward. Saw him 10 years later working at a car wash. All of this happened in 1997.
25. A Cruel Mistake
My work called my wife and told her I may have been fatally wounded in an accident. As I was getting into my car I smashed my cell phone charger, and soon lost signal. A cabbage truck had wrecked on a two-lane road, spilling hundreds of cabbages and the driver onto the road, blocking the road for hours. For some reason, they leaped to the conclusion that I was in the accident.
I finally get to a landline and call in, and everyone loses it, saying “Call your wife, we might have told her you were dead.” She bursts into tears as soon as she heard my voice. Just the goofiest thing I ever experienced.
26. Dance Deflation
I was at my first school dance in middle school. I was always a shy kid, so I was surprised when one of the popular chicks came to ask me to dance. I said no because I was shy, but I was elated that I got asked. A few minutes later I’m in the bathroom stall and a few kids come in and start talking about how they paid her 10 bucks to ask me, and if I said yes she would have just tripped me and made me look dumb.
I never went to another dance throughout middle and high school. Even prom.
27. Trick Or Treat
20 years ago, a friend of mine was prank kidnapped on Halloween. Driven to a cornfield and left tied up and blindfolded for an hour. It was not funny. The "friends" that did this got some time in the slammer.
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28. No Respect For Living Things
This kid in my school had a friend over who was a compulsive liar and was trying to convince him he had super speed. To prove it he said he was going to throw the guy’s hamster as hard as he could and then go catch it before it hit the wall. Needless to say a few, seconds later the other guy is standing there shocked as his hamster was flattened against the wall and its life ended.
The kid tried to play it off but when the mother came up and saw what happened she told him to leave and that he wasn't allowed to come back. I genuinely think we need to watch out for kids like this. Kids that care more about being funny and impressing other kids than about the life of an innocent creature. Either they genuinely don't know that it's wrong to kill things or they do know but care more about themselves, which is also horrifying.
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29. A Pregnant Pause
The first time I met my brother's new girlfriend she pulled me aside and started crying. She told me that she was pregnant but my brother wasn't ready to tell anyone. She asked me to check up on him cause he was nervous. A couple of days go by and I texted her to see how she was doing and if my brother was doing okay and if they needed anything.
She asked me what I was talking about. I said the baby. She replied: "Oh, you believed me! I was only joking, I'm not pregnant! I can't believe you fell for that." This wasn't some teenager either. She was 30. Yes, I told my brother. Yes, he still ended up marrying her. Almost 10 years later I still refuse to trust her.
30. Pantsed
One of the guys on my high school track team was pantsed directly in front of the girls from the team. He wasn’t wearing underwear. The person who pantsed him was one of his close friends.
31. Freaking Out Little Brother
I was the one who did the prank. When we were little, we had handheld radios. I also had a dolphin plush that I drew angry eyebrows onto, and that freaked my brother out. So one day, I hid it under the blanket next to where I knew he was going to take a nap with the radio next to it. I could hardly wait to scare the wits out of him...
When he went into the room, I waited like five minutes or so and said "I SEE YOU" into my handheld and he came running out screaming for his life. My dad smashed our PlayStation apart because I did that. We were like eight or nine.
32. Nothing Sweet About This
I was In Grade 7 on Valentine’s Day and we had “candy grams” and cutesy stuff we could send to our friends. Middle schoolers are sending them to their “crushes”, they would receive these candy grams during a class period as someone came by dropping them off. You could write a little message and then who it’s from.
I got one from this guy/friend I liked and went up to him the next period and brought it up and said it was really cute and thanks! He looked a little confused but was like “No problem?” I felt kind of dumb after that and walked away, just to find out the next day that it was one of my “friends” who sent it to me and just put his name on it to make it seem like it was him.
I mean, at least he was nice enough to go along with it because he was just as confused.
33. This One Takes Balls
I put meatballs in the chute for the ice maker so when my roommate went to get some ice his glass filled up with meatballs.
34. “Most Awkward Party Ever”
We had a roast for my buddy in college that was supposed to be a lot of fun. My roommate decided to go after his ex-girlfriend the entire time during his speech instead of our buddy, which is a kind of funny concept. It ended up being a drunken therapy session for him where he aired out all the most personal aspects of their relationship to a room of 50 people. And then it got even worse...
He ended the speech by throwing multiple pairs of panties she left at his house into the crowd. She was so mortified she called the authorities. Most awkward party ever.
35. Not Too Sharp
At my school, there was a kid who would unscrew the razors of handheld
and then try to discretely cut people’s forearms and legs. What he'd been trying to accomplish is (and this is just twisted) to make the people’s parents think their children were cutting themselves. Whenever the victim went to try and tell the teachers, they'd think the same thing.
Things got worse when the person he'd been constantly targeting beat him. The victim was put to juvie, he got out practically free, and now he uses needles to poke holes into people.
36. Joke Is Scratched
We had been having a really bad year financially. I was constantly scrambling to pay bills etc. Christmas was especially difficult. On Christmas day my brother-in-law gave my husband and me scratch tickets, which is a common gift in their family. I have had them maybe once or so, so I was excited to scratch them. As I did, the weight lifted off my shoulders.
The ticket was a winner. A Christmas miracle! For the first time in a long time, I felt like things might be okay. The ticket said I won $10,000. I was so, so happy. My brother-in-law let me stew for a few minutes in my utter relief and elation before instructing me to look closer at the ticket. It was a fake. My bubble of joy popped and I held back tears as I pretended to laugh and the weight of my troubles dropped back on my shoulders with a grand thump as my brother-in-law laughed.
He continued to laugh and relive the whole scenario the rest of the day. I hated him at that moment. I think possibly he regaled other people with the story and they told him he was a douche because he never brought it up again like I expected him to. He had given my husband a couple to use as pranks but I destroyed them.
My husband never knew how hurt I was as I laughed and went along with the joke (plus he is not very empathic or compassionate).
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37. Rise And Shine
I shared a bedroom with my older brother. One night I fell asleep first. While I slept, he set my clock to just before 7:00 am. It was usually set to go off at 6:00 am on a school day. He also got dressed in his school clothes. The real-time was about 10:30 pm. He woke me up and yelled, “Get up! Your alarm didn’t go off and you’re going to be late for school!”
I panicked, jumped out of bed, ran to the bathroom for a quick shower, got dressed, and ran downstairs to grab a bite to eat so I could get to school on time. My parents, who were watching TV, came into the kitchen to see what was going on and exposed my brother’s ruse.
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38. Kids Can Be Cruel
In high school, there was a girl who was a part of the spectrum and she was showing off a dance, and these cheerleaders were laughing at her. The thing is, is that the girl didn’t realize they were making fun of her. They told her to do it again just so they could laugh more.
39. Simply The Worst
The TV show WB Superstar from the early 2000s. It was a show like American Idol, but they were looking for the worst singers. They told the contestants they were looking for the best singers until the very end of the competition when they revealed the truth to the winner after their final performance in front of a live audience. It a very cruel show.
40. Vicious Viral Videos
There was that YouTube "family" that was like, "Daddy of Five" or something, where one of the kids was teased constantly. They would do horrible things to this boy and then say "it was a prank for the channel" and he would be destroyed and scream that he hated YouTube.
41. Why Being A Kid Is Hard
In middle school, I was not popular at all. I was an overweight girl with acne and a really weird personality. The popular boys were downright cruel. They would come up to me all the time to ask me out only to laugh in my face no matter the answer. It happened so often that all the other students started to notice and ignore me completely so they didn't get grouped into all the cruel jokes the boys pulled.
42. Duly Noted
A girl wrote an elaborate letter pretending to be another girl in class and handed it to me. I was shocked to receive my first love letter and felt like garbage when I found out it was fake.
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43. Calm In The Face Of Cruelty
At my high school (a hundred years ago, back in the 80s), some football players talked a special education kid into sneaking over and grabbing a girl's bottom right in the middle of the main area during lunchtime with tons of people around. This kid was really well-liked at the school and it was perfectly obvious that he was only doing it because they were being nice to him.
Luckily, the girl who was the victim talked to him calmly and explained that it wasn't something nice to do and that the kids who seemed nice were being mean to him. As I recall, the kid’s teacher wanted him to go back to eating lunch in his class but lots of students talked her down and there was never another incident. He was still well-liked.
The girl who was “pranked” was a popular and successful student and while I didn’t know her I knew enough about her to say with confidence that she had a great career ahead of her. Don’t think anything happened to the football players. The story has stuck with me because of the cruelty of the ‘prank’ based on manipulating a kid not able to understand he was being used.
Also, the poise and maturity of the girl who didn’t get angry with the kid even though it happened to her in front of half the school.
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44. Positively Pointless
I remember seeing a video where they switched the pregnancy test to a fake positive one on their “friend” struggling with infertility. Cruel.
45. Dreadful Dorms
A friend of mine faked her own death to get back at her boyfriend for April Fools Day. I had helped her without knowing she was going that far. Her boyfriend dumped her when she told him she was pregnant. Don’t miss living in college dorms, don’t miss either of them.
46. Choke-A-Cola
When I was a kid, somehow my classmates found it funny to urinate in other people's cans of soda. I did not have a good childhood.
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47. Leaving Her Stranded
A group of girls at my high school told a girl that they were hanging out at one of their houses at nine near a train station, but they just made up a time and place that would make her stranded at the last train stop with no more trains home.
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48. Tied Up At The Moment
When I was in Grade 8 a thing called turtling and zip tying backpacks were popular. Well, one day early in the year on the bus ride home a kid decided to zip tie a 6th grader’s backpack to the leg of the chair which is welded to the floor. When he got up to leave and realized his backpack was stuck he started panicking trying to get it undone.
Eventually, he had to leave the backpack and he was stressing out saying his mom was going to freak out on him. He looked like he was about to cry.
49. Crush Is Crushed
A friend of mine had a crush on his coworker. It was sort of an open secret. His manager tried to help him, offered advice, some things to say, small gifts she might be into, etc. What no one knew at the time was that said manager and said coworker had recently started dating and hadn't told anyone yet.
So he meant it as a "prank" on his new girlfriend to be put into these awkward situations, but my friend's feelings were hurt when it all came out.
50. A Bad Birthday
A group of friends got together and one of the usuals named Eddie didn't make it. Eddie texts asking what they're up to and they sarcastically respond "celebrating your birthday without you." Lo and behold, it was coincidentally Eddie’s birthday weekend and he had no birthday plans.
Upon realizing this, the group bought and decorated a cake that read "Happy Birthday Eddie" and staged a series of fake birthday party photos to make him think they forgot to invite him to his party. To keep the prank going, they dropped off the smashed, leftover cake on his doorstep. He still hasn't found out so they keep making elaborate stories as to why they forgot to invite him.
The group later paid him back with a block of expensive cheese in his mailbox marked "Happy Birthday Eddie"
51. Mysterious Threat
I was once prank-called by someone, a classmate presumably, and they told me they were going to eradicate my best friend who was in the same class as me. It was weird, the school never figured out who it was, they just asked if my friend "had any enemies". Bro, we are eleven?
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52. Dating Devastation
In junior high, I got the courage to ask her out and she said "yes". I took her to a movie and asked her if she wanted to be boyfriend/girlfriend, and again, she said "yes!" She carried on like we were dating, saying things like "I'm so happy we're finally together." The girl would walk around holding my hand in school and I was in heaven.
I couldn't have been happier at that moment in my life because I was dating my dream girl. All the popular dudes would snicker when we walked by, but I didn't care because I was too happy. A week or so went by and she was laughing when she said it was just a joke. I have never been so devastated.
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53. Why I Never Go To Office Christmas Parties
It was at a company Christmas party. We all participated in the gift exchange. Well, a fellow employee gifted fake scratch-off lotto tickets to another employee. She scratched them and legit thought she won 10k, she was screaming and crying with joy (single mom so you can imagine). She started calling her family to tell them the good news and then she's buying everyone drinks.
Eventually, the gifter came clean with the news that they were fake. And then she had a nervous breakdown and it was really sad. But then things got heated. Her brother eventually came to pick her up from the party (designated driver) and he beat the other employee who gave the gift! I never attended another Christmas party ever again.
Too much drama and something always goes wrong or people can't handle themselves and then they start hooking up with each other. It's just a rule I have now!
54. A Stone’s Throw
A group of 5 boys decided to throw rocks from an overpass at the cars below. But this was no joke—it was full-out reckless. They ended up paying for this "prank" for the rest of their lives. One of the rocks ended up going through a car’s windshield and ending the life of the driver. The boys got charged with second-degree homicide.
55. Potty Problems
I saw a man tip over in a porta-potty. It was some rando looking for a laugh. The guy gets out covered in that blue gunk and other nasty stuff and fuming, proceeds to beat this guy within inches of his life with a brick. He got some incarceration time, and the other guy was hospitalized. I don't think bludgeoning your prankster is right, but I can say I understand why he did it.
Sources: Reddit,
