Teen Finds Out Friend Is A Thief, Comes Up With A Revenge Plan That Has Him Suffering For Years
When a teenager began noticing that his belongings were mysteriously disappearing, he initially had no reason to suspect one of his closest friends. He had always trusted the small group of friends he spent time with after school, especially because they had known each other for years. However, small incidents gradually started adding up. Things would go missing from his room, personal items would disappear without explanation, and whenever he asked around, nobody seemed to know anything. At first, he assumed he had simply misplaced the items, but after several similar incidents, he became convinced that someone close to him was responsible.
The situation changed when he finally discovered evidence that pointed directly toward one of his friends. Instead of confronting him immediately, the teenager decided to keep quiet and observe what was happening. He wanted to understand how long the theft had been going on and whether his friend had been taking things from other people as well. As he paid closer attention, he realized that the friend had been taking advantage of the trust within their group. The discovery was especially painful because the teenager had considered him a genuine friend and had never imagined that someone he trusted would secretly steal from him.
Rather than simply telling everyone what had happened, the teenager began thinking about how he could make his friend understand the consequences of his actions. He came up with a plan that relied on the same sense of trust his friend had abused. Without revealing that he knew about the theft, he carefully created a situation that would expose his friend’s behavior and make it difficult for him to escape responsibility. The teenager was determined not to let the situation turn into a simple argument that everyone would eventually forget. He wanted his friend to realize that stealing from someone he trusted had consequences.
The plan eventually worked, but the consequences were much bigger than the teenager initially expected. His friend was forced to deal with the results of what he had done, and the friendship was effectively destroyed. What started as a few missing belongings turned into a much deeper conflict involving trust, betrayal, and accountability. Other people also began looking at the friend differently once they learned what had happened. For the teenager, the experience changed the way he viewed friendships and made him much more careful about who he trusted with his personal belongings and private life.
Years later, the incident was still remembered because of how dramatically it changed the relationship between the two teenagers. The original theft may have seemed like something minor at the time, but the fallout continued for years and affected the person who had committed it. The teenager eventually moved forward with his own life, but he never forgot the feeling of discovering that someone he trusted had betrayed him. What began as a simple case of a friend secretly taking things ultimately became a long-lasting lesson about trust, consequences, and how one dishonest decision can have effects far beyond the original act.
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Use my friendship to steal from me? Get ready to pay me back in full and move.
Ok, so this is going a long way back, but I was encouraged to put this up.
Back in my years at high school, PS1-PS2 era, I lived with my grandmother because it was closer to my school than my mothers, who at the time was self-employed and now is a successful SEO developer. I was not popular in school but had a closely nit group of friends on my home street.
Myself included was 10 kids on our street (6 of which were pairs of siblings across 7 houses), we all played games, we all completed games, but the amount of games we could get was different. Being the kid with the most I offered that if anyone wanted to go on a game at my house I would let them.
Now I have OCD, (among other things thanks to a mental disorder.) that meant I use Excel to record what games I own, if they were bought brand new. The price they were bought at. And I had dealt with people mis-using my friendship in school (not high school) to steal from me and my grandma coming in to save the day.
But my main hobby is games, so when I started going to high school I started pen marking the inside of game covers (the white side of that cover no one sees. Doesn’t effect re-sale value.) I would also jot the mark down in a notebook with a reference to the game name, again if it was new, pre-owned or I had traded it in.
I would on occasion lend a game with the express direction that if you borrow it for more than two weeks, I would hound you for it back. People rarely borrowed from me since what they wanted to go on they could do so at my house. Around the age of 14 games started going missing, losing one was not new to me but the frequency of games that went missing had increased.
So I set a test. I bought a second notebook and wrote down where each game should have been, editing it if I moved it. Sure enough my copy of FF10 in my PC draw wound up ‘lost’ it was then I realised the worst, one of my friends was stealing from me.
Fortunately the ball was not rolling on certain things. While Game FAQs was a thing it wasn’t big enough a thing in my neck of the woods for anyone other than me to be using it and I kept it that way by helping anyone on my street with information.
Bear in mind as well the internet was not so readily used as it is now and a PC did not mean internet access, a PC was just a workstation for school work and PC games bought at a store. If you had internet, it either came with dial up and was used by one person in the house or you used the Sky internet keyboard to search using your set top box.
Secondly and more importantly, it was a 15 minute ride to town and a two hour drive to the nearest city, the difference, town did not have a Game station.
The two places that sold and traded games in town had one policy. The game must come with a box, the disk and the manual. I spent an hour removing every manual I had from the games and storing them in a box under the bottom shelf of my set of drawers, if someone was stealing from me, they wouldn’t be profiting off me anymore.
I could glean information from outside sources the three sets of siblings on my street were innocent. Group one, I will refer to as Sisters, their mother came and helped myself and my grandma clean my great grandmothers house on Saturdays.
I would ask about what they’re playing on, if a game that went missing came up I would ask “oh, when did they start on that?” For 2 reasons, 1, their mother was kind and I didn’t want to upset her, 2 to avoid showing suspicion. However it was responded with, “I bought it them”, or “they bought it when we were in town.” So, innocent.
The second pair, referred to as Twinies, got whatever they asked for within reason from their parents. So there was no doubt they were innocent. The third, “brothers” the younger couldn’t keep a secret, and I was very good friends with (helped him in school work, made up the difference if he couldn’t quite afford a drink or chocolate bar, made sure I was an ear for him to talk to.) because I didn’t trust the other brother beyond friendship. If the older brother was playing anything that was missing, I would know and how. Again, innocent.
That left 3 boys on my street of varying age who I only know on a one to one basis. If I had suspects it would be them. Over 2 years of maintaining the facade that I was blissfully unaware, I kept the helpful nature up enough that no one ever questioned my gaming source, GameFAQs. Sure enough games kept going missing, but I was looking for something, no manuals, no trade ins, no trade ins, no extra cash towards the latest games.
I had actually been waiting for one of the games to go missing that people had seen me play and wanted to play. Vexx, a game similar to Mario 64 but replace stars with hearts. One of the hearts had copy protection on it in that the answer was in the manual (a common practice before it became useless on the internet), sure enough, a month after finishing, it went missing.
A week later, a boy my age I will refer to as ‘thieving shit’, (TS) asked me how to open the chest in the whale. “oh, it’s in the manual…” TS replied that he had no manual, and that it was bought at a car boot sale. In my mind, I had got him. His parents didn’t go far, so no city trips or rare city trips. And there had been no “car boot sales” nearby in the last 4 months.
I made my play. TS went to Karate Practice on Tuesdays between 7 and 9, I waited till 7:10 PM and went to his house with my grandma with my notebooks, printouts of my records on game purchases and a document. (I will get to that in a moment.)
After a brief talk of disbelief I asked if I could prove if their son was stealing, thinking I wouldn’t find anything, they let me. I walked over to the copy of Vexx sat in the front room, showed them the inside with no manual, showed them my notebook, and lifted the cover out of the game box, showing a signed pen mark I had used next to the notebook with the same pen mark on the inside cover.
While they were stunned I took this opportunity to pick up a second and third, point to the pen mark in the book and then moved the label accordingly to show an identical copy. The mother went white. I asked if I could go see if more were in the house. Shocked, the father complied and after 20 minutes I had 30+ games on the table in front of them, all missing booklets, all with pen marks on the reverse of the label that matched the inside of the notebooks.
But the best bit, upstairs on his PC desk was a note, detailing who had what. When I showed them the note you could see the rage building in the Fathers eyes, while my grandma talked to the mother about what could happen next (legal ramifications of thief, how he was now 16 and could be tried as an adult, with the right judge.) I showed the father where I found the note and he found folders of records of games owned by others and when he had ‘Acquired’ them and how much he had traded them in for.
Yes, it wasn’t just me, over several years he had been stealing games as far back as the Mega Drive era, playing on them till he was done and then trading them in as his own to pocket the cash. He had only started with me since a few years back my grandma had allowed me to move consoles downstairs for friends to go on, on the condition that it was only when I had friends round and only one console at a time with only the game we were going on to avoid making a mess.
Going downstairs I laid out the document I had saved till now, it was a document that myself, my grandmother and my mother had laid out, detailed that I would not take the evidence I had to the police on the condition that every game wrongfully taken was returned to me or the original owner, if in the event it could not be then the full price of the game when I bought it would be returned to my grandmother within 6 months’ time. So it could be returned to the rightful owners in one form or another.
(I had to thank my mother here for the for thought of wording it so that in the event I wasn’t the only victim, all would have justice, so thanks mum.)
Both parents signed it, i signed it and my grandma signed it, and the 4 of us waited at that time we talked over how we would handle this, agreeing that I would take the folders home and do the research on the retail price on any missing game.
When TS returned the look on his face was priceless as he stared at the folders and pile of games. In that time I had called my granddad to help us carry the games and notes down the street back to home. Before leaving we informed TS what would happen much to his dismay.
His house is 4 doors down and across the small one exit street, at the other end is a garden and a modern train line (2000s) that runs through the town. From 9 till 10 I could hear the father yelling at TS, even when the 9:15 train went past, while I was going through the records on my PC scanning them in on a very basic scanner by today’s standards, it felt great and I found it soothing as I combed through.
That weekend I printed off several copies of the agreement and documents listing what had been stolen from each of my friends or pair of siblings, how much they were worth and when to expect the money. I returned the folders and gave the parents a copy of the agreement with a value of how much he had stolen (from all parties) and could not return.
They told me they would pay and it would come out of TS savings and allowance. For the next 4 years. Both me and him were 16 at the time, he would be in his first year of university before he paid his parents back, unsurprisingly, the karate trips, stopped. Once they had closed the door I pulled several envelopes out of my bag and made the rounds of my streets, every kid got one of these envelopes that held the information relevant to them and a copy of the agreement.
To my surprise, it took 2 weeks for every penny to be given to my grandma, using the records I gave each of my friends exactly what they were owed in an envelope to avoid prying eyes. Once that was done I waited till the following Monday and handed a copy of the agreement to my school. Like most schools, mine had a system to that duties would be delegated to the most trustworthy and well behaved of the students that both me and TS were on.
TS was removed from that list and the staff knew he was a thieving shit. On my street, he was removed from the circle of friends, we wouldn’t talk to him, he wasn’t welcome at street events. Most certainly not any trips. In school he was not allowed on the remaining few school trips because his father wouldn’t sign permission slips.
After that, I didn’t change, sure we were one friend down, but none of my games went missing again. At 18 I moved because of College to my mum’s but I had only used up the money returned to me by then on a 360. My mum keeps a framed copy of the signed agreement in the office and I keep the original framed in my office to this day to remind me.
Unsurprisingly after finishing high school he and his parents moved away. As it was quite clear that the kids and parents alike wanted nothing to do with him.
A Small Problem Turns Into A Friendship Betrayal He Would Never Forget
Looking back, this was one of those situations that started as a small problem but eventually turned into something I would remember for years. I was a teenager at the time and spent most of my free time with a small group of friends who lived nearby. We weren’t the most popular kids at school, but we were close and trusted each other.
Because we had known each other for a long time, I never thought I needed to worry about my belongings around them. My friends regularly came over to my house, and we would spend hours playing video games, talking, and hanging out. I never imagined that one of them could be secretly taking things from me.
The first time I noticed something missing, I didn’t think much of it. It was a personal item that wasn’t extremely valuable, so I assumed I had misplaced it. I searched my room, checked different places, and eventually gave up looking for it.
A few weeks later, another item disappeared. This time, I was almost certain that I knew exactly where I had left it. I started wondering whether someone had taken it, but I still didn’t want to accuse any of my friends without evidence.
Then more things began disappearing. None of them were expensive enough to cause a huge financial loss, but the pattern was becoming impossible to ignore. I started keeping better track of my belongings and paying attention to who had been around whenever something disappeared.
Eventually, I noticed that many of the incidents seemed to happen after one particular friend had visited. He was someone I trusted, which made the possibility especially upsetting. I didn’t want to believe that he could actually be responsible.
Instead of confronting him immediately, I decided to observe him more carefully. I watched how he behaved when he came over and noticed how interested he sometimes was in the things I owned. He would ask questions about certain items and occasionally spend more time around my belongings than I expected.
I still didn’t have enough proof to make a direct accusation. If I confronted him and he denied everything, I could have ended up looking like the unreasonable one. So I decided to wait and see what happened next.
During this time, I became much more careful with my possessions. I remembered where I put things and made sure I knew exactly what I had before my friends arrived. The more careful I became, the more convinced I was that the missing items weren’t simply the result of me being forgetful.
Eventually, I started thinking about how I could confirm my suspicions without starting a huge argument. I wanted to catch him in the act rather than rely on assumptions. More importantly, I wanted him to realize that his behavior had consequences.
I came up with a plan that involved creating an opportunity where he might think he could take something without anyone noticing. I made sure the situation wasn’t dangerous and didn’t involve anyone getting hurt. My only goal was to find out whether he would actually steal when he thought nobody was watching.
I continued acting normally around him so that he wouldn’t become suspicious. We still talked and spent time together like nothing had changed. As far as he knew, I had no idea what was happening.
Eventually, the opportunity came. I placed myself in a situation where I could observe what he would do without making it obvious that I was watching him. For a while, nothing happened, and I wondered if I had been wrong about him all along.
Then he made his move. He took the opportunity to take something that wasn’t his, believing that nobody would notice. At that moment, I finally had the confirmation I had been waiting for.
I was angry and disappointed at the same time. It wasn’t really about the value of the item. What hurt most was realizing that someone I considered a friend had been taking advantage of my trust.
