What I’m about to tell you will be very difficult for me to talk about. It was by far one of the scariest moments of my life. My name is Amber and I’m a college student. This horrifying event took place about a year ago during my sophomore year. 

I had created an Instagram account and I’ve been posting to it avidly since high school. It recently blew up, gaining me loads of followers. I’m not going to lie, the pictures I was posting were rather scandalous. I’m not proud of them, but I’m a broke college student desperate for some extra cash. Anyway, my account started to gain a lot of attention. Mostly from guys who usually post disgusting comments about the things they’d like to do to me. I just brushed them off, but I also started making friends with other influencers. 

I heavily started to network with other “instamodels” so I could increase my following and hopefully gain some sponsors to start making some money. I definitely didn’t aspire to work a dreaded 9-5 job. I watched my parents work their lives away in jobs they hated and I didn’t want to follow down the same path. 

Anyway, I had over 400k followers at the time and received an interesting invitation. It was for an Influencer event. It looked legit. There were going to be speakers that would share secrets to grow your following, other influencers to network with, and potential sponsors there. It got me excited and it was too good to pass up. Not only that, but it was also here in LA, which is where I was currently living at the time. 

Now, here’s where things started to get odd. I mentioned the event to my influencer friends. None of them received an invitation. It surprised me because most of them had 10x the followers I had. Surely they’d get invited to something like this before I would. Even so, there was no way I was going to pass up this opportunity. 

So just to be safe, I invited a guy friend of mine whom I knew has wanted to date me for some time now. Gavin is his name and he’s one of those gymaholics who is built like a bus. He definitely didn’t want to miss an opportunity to go to an event where it’d be mostly instamodels even if he did have eyes for me. 

So he drove us out to where this event was supposed to be held which apparently was out in the middle of nowhere. That should’ve been cause to turn around, but I really needed those sponsors. We pulled up to what looked like a pole barn. It looked very sketchy. 

Both Gavin and I knew something had to be up. However, Gavin wanted to know what was inside. I just wanted to get out of there at this point, but I let him talk me into going inside. We hesitantly walked up to the building and walked in. It was dark inside and I pleaded with Gavin to leave. He wanted to see what the hell this was all about. He pulled out his phone and turned on the flashlight. I grabbed onto his arm and followed him inside. My heart was pounding inside my chest. 

We found a table and what was on the table nearly made me throw up. There were pictures. Pictures of me. There were some where I was walking to class. Some of me in my apartment. There were some of me changing!

“You were supposed to come alone,” A voice echoed out from the darkness. Both Gavin and I looked at each other before we both ran out of there. We rushed into the car as several masked men chased us out. Be barely got into the car and locked the doors as they tried to pull the door handles. Gavin floored it out of there. I still can’t believe we managed to escape. I took that as a lesson that if something sounds too good to be true, it definitely is. I’ve been looking over my shoulder ever since.