Source: Reddit
This was a good few years ago now but it still puts a smile on my face. I’d been in a relationship with a guy (let’s call him Steve) who seemed super nice on the surface but turned out to be pretty manipulative and a habitual cheater.
While we were together I took out a phone contract for Steve in my name, as his credit score was poor and the company wouldn’t give him one. It was all fine and I never had any problems with him paying me back, even when we broke up. Then, a month before the contract was up, I had a bombshell dropped on me by a mutual friend who had found out the extent of Steve’s cheating and lies and thought I deserved to know. I’d once been suspicious about Steve’s relationship with a particular woman, but when my suspicions came out he gaslit the hell out of me and turned himself into the victim. Turns out my suspicions had been right on the money after all.
Needless to say, I confronted Steve (though I did it as coolly as I could). I was pissed, I’d wasted literal years of my life being taken for an idiot. Not only that but the manipulation had continued long after the break-up, as we’d stayed “friends”, and I was finally done with it. I told him that I was cutting him out of my life, and that I never wanted to hear from him again.
My confrontation didn’t go down well, but by this point he’d already sent me the money for the final month of the contract so I thought it was all ok on that front. I was wrong – turns out Steve could still rack up a pretty big charge if he went over his data allowance, something he’d always been super careful not to do. That’s why I was pretty sure it was deliberate when I was sent a final bill for close to 80 dollars. I could have covered the bill and kept that door closed, but it would have been at the expense of other things and I wasn’t about to let that slide on top of everything else he’d put me through.
I contacted the company to make sure the charge wasn’t down to some overseen contract clause, and that he really had stacked up that bill in excess charges alone. He had. Seems he didn’t like no longer having control over me.
Determined to get my money back, I tried to get in touch with Steve – but he’d blocked me on every single avenue of contact I had for him. It was then I realised that I still had his mother’s number in my contacts.
Immediately I texted her with an outline of what had happened – that I’d confronted her son about his treatment of me and that I was convinced he’d deliberately landed me with a big phone bill as some sort of petty pay-back. While she wasn’t impressed that her son’s drama was landing on her doorstep via me, she asked for proof of the bill and said she’d sort it. The money landed in my account within an hour and I was free of him forever. I wish I’d seen the look on his face when his mother made him, a grown a** man, sort it out – that was no small amount of money to him at the time either.
I know he occasionally still stirs shit about me years later, as the odd petty comment on his social media sometimes makes it back to me through friends – if anything, this makes my petty determination even sweeter. Having the money was nice, but getting the last laugh was better.
