Nothing beats the sensation of getting revenge! But there’s more than just one variety of revenge, there’s utterly ruthless revenge, calculated revenge, and life-ruining tales of revenge that you could argue go too far. Well, in this article, you’ll find them all! So, get ready for the schadenfreude, as we take a look at yet more extreme cases of revenge that were practically nuclear!
Prank Payback
We all know that one person who takes pranks too far, as reddit user TarzanisMyPony once did. He worked with a woman who went a bit overboard with the pranks, whether it was slipping inappropriate slides into Tarzan’s PowerPoint presentations or hiding her co-workers’ car keys and then leaving the office. She was reprimanded a few times but that didn’t seem to stop her.
Then, one morning after his birthday celebrations, Tarzan came into the office very hungover. He reached for the water bottle he left on his desk and took several huge gulps before realizing that it wasn’t water, it was vodka. As he suddenly hurled everywhere, his prank happy co-worker started laughing herself silly. She was reprimanded again but showed almost no remorse, and so Tarzan decided to give her a taste of her own medicine. Knowing she was an avid dog lover and vegan, he decided to hit her where it hurt. Before she came into the office one morning, he printed out a bunch of lost dog posters, pinning them up outside the office and a few local establishments. She fell for it, picking one up and asking around the office if anyone had seen the poor pooch. Obviously, being a total fabrication, no one had. The next day though, Tarzan bought in some fake fur and a collar he’d purchased online, along with a liter of red corn syrup. Once she arrived at the office, Tarzan slipped out and made a beeline to her car. He smeared the corn syrup along the side of the car, peppered it with the fake fur, and left the collar snagged in the wheel arch. To anyone none the wiser, it looked like she’d hit a dog!
Tarzan then returned to his desk and waited for the fireworks to fly. It wasn’t long before someone put the missing dog posters and the crime scene at the car together, and management called her over to take a look. She was distraught! She couldn’t explain what had happened but could only conclude that she must have hit the missing dog, which the entire office now knew about!
She was so horrified and distraught that at no point did she or anyone else realize any of the set up was fake! And so, the annoying dog-loving vegan prankster soon became known throughout the office as a heartless dog killer, and Tarzan didn’t correct anyone. She quit not long after. She probably figured her dog days were over!
Don’t Mess with Meemaw
If there’s one rule to follow in life, it’s to never mess with old people. Seriously, even the kindest, sweetest granny can be a master of revenge, as reddit user Remote-Syllabub7412 learned. They were visiting their grandparents when they noticed the lot next to their house was empty. Weird, there had definitely been a house there before! They asked their grandparents where it had gone, and boy did they have a story!
Apparently, the neighbors who had lived there were unpleasant. They were loud, aggressive, and their son had even broken into the grandparents’ house, stealing and pawning off some of the grandfather’s guitar collection! Luckily everything was insured, and the son was sent to jail, but that just made the family even harder to deal with! They were even louder, more aggressive, and in the end just straight up started harassing them on a daily basis!
So, Syllabub’s grandma got to thinking. The house they were living in was rented, but the landlord didn’t bother with upkeep, and it hadn’t been maintained properly in years. With that in mind, grandma called the local authorities with concerns about the property, and soon someone official looking came out to do a routine inspection. The state of the house was so bad, it was deemed unfit to live in, and within a few days the neighbors were moved out by their landlord. But now the landlord was angry, and after learning it was Syllabub’s grandma who’d reported the house, he began hurling insults and abuse at them whenever he drove by. But grandma wasn’t done there, not by a long shot! She made frequent calls every day for weeks to a whole bunch of different state services, complaining about the house and the danger it posed. This meant the landlord was hit with a bunch of fines, however he refused to pay them, so everything got escalated to the courts. When he didn’t show up for his court date though, a warrant was issued for his arrest!
Eventually, after a few months of the landlord not showing, a demolition team arrived at the old house, and within a week, it’d been bulldozed! So, not only did meemaw get rid of her bad neighbors, but she also made sure she’d never have to deal with bad neighbors ever again! Moral of this story? Do not mess with the elderly.
Itching for revenge
A lot of stories go into their revenge in detail, but some are so simple they’re more impactful. Like Tiktok user soojonii’s story. She found out her boyfriend was cheating on her, but instead of getting mad, she decided to order some bedbugs.
Bedbugs? The creepy little bloodsucking insects that hide in soft furnishings and leave you with nasty, itchy red bumps? Yes, bedbugs, which she then sprinkled all over his bedroom before dumping him. That way, whenever he invited a new girl around to his place to get nasty, they’d both get very itchy very quickly, making everyone think he had something infectious!
At first, this story seemed a little questionable. To begin with, where can you buy bed bugs? Well, after a quick Google, a lot of places, it would seem! Some of these places even offer bedbug subscription services! If that doesn’t make you think twice about cheating, I don’t know what will!
Cheater Tailor Soldier Spy
Becoming a soldier is one of the most selfless careers a person can undertake, even more so if you were this next poor, now deleted, reddit user. He was a soldier about to be deployed to Iraq, which his wife at the time wasn’t a fan of. They didn’t have any kids, and she didn’t have a job, but as she tearfully said goodbye to him at the airport, she promised when he got back, they’d start a family.
This promise kept our soldier going while he was out in the field, along with the regular text messages and calls they shared. But after a few months, she suddenly started acting distant; putting off their calls or not responding to his messages. He didn’t think too much of it at first, but then one day she texted him “Hey babe, I’ll see you after work, want me to save you my leftovers?” He was 10,000 miles away, so who was she calling "babe" and sharing her food with? He hoped it was one of her girlfriends, but when he questioned it, she quickly broke down and revealed she’d been cheating on him! He was heartbroken, and they agreed to get divorced when he returned.
But a month before that happened, she informed him she was actually pregnant, obviously not with his baby! It’s a sucker punch, but with a heroic amount of restraint, our soldier did nothing as he watched her moved to a different state 10 hours away with her new baby daddy. For the next 5 months, our soldier slowly rebuilt his life! And then, one day, he got a phone call. It was his ex-wife. She’d had a huge fight with her baby daddy, and she didn’t know where to go or what to do, and finally, our soldier sees a chance to get his revenge. Calmly, he says down the phone “Sorry, that’s not my problem”! And hangs up. The next month, she calls him again. They’ve had another fight. She’s desperate to leave him. The soldier replies “Ah, bummer. That sucks. Hope it all works out!” And hangs up again. And then the next month, she calls a third time. This time, he’s cheating on her, with 2 girls! She says she’s sorry, she’s messed everything up, would he take her back? He thought about it, for all of 1 second before replying “Never” and hung up. And with that, he proved that sometimes the most nuclear revenge you can get is just saying no!
© Be Amazed
Park it There
Finding decent parking in a busy city can be pure hell, though one reddit user, who we’ll call Will, found his particular parking situation had an infuriating twist!
He lived in an apartment complex in Lisbon, Portugal, and owned a private parking space. But one day, Will noticed a car that wasn’t his was using his space. He parked on the street for a day and left a note on the imposter car, but the next day noticed the note was gone, though his spot was still being used.
After asking around, he figured the person using his spot was a lady who lived in an apartment above him. He knocked on her door and asked her politely to move her car, but she claimed the spot was hers. Confused, he asked about the parking spot registered to her apartment. She rudely responded that she was using it for storage, that his space had been empty when she found it so now it was hers, and that she wouldn’t be moving her car - before slamming the door in his face.
Will calmly decided to take this to the building manager, but was told there was nothing they could do! One day he noticed she’d moved her car, and so parked his car in his spot, but the next morning, someone had keyed the side of it. That was the last straw, it was time for revenge!
He got in touch with a friend of his who owned a towing company, and then early one morning, they hitched her car up to a tow truck, and hauled it out of Will’s space. Initially they planned to drop it in a nearby town to teach her a lesson, but then his friend jokingly said, “let’s leave it in Madrid!”. From Lisbon, Madrid is some 388 miles away in the neighboring country of Spain. For two guys with nothing else to do, it sounded perfect! So, they towed the car to a different country, dropped the car in an illegal spot next to a police station, spent the evening in beautiful Madrid, and drove home the following day!
To make sure the car never found its way back, Will’s friend even removed the license plates! Two weeks on, and with no sign of her car anywhere, Will was able to use his space whenever he liked, and he got to see Madrid! We all know who the winner is here.
Merry Christmas
There’s a special circle of hell reserved for people who steal packages from porches, though there’s an even deeper one for people who refuse to return items mistakenly sent to the wrong address. Luckily, VintagePatriot has a story that exacts some incredible revenge on this type of person!
Patriot and his wife fostered a lot of unfortunate kids, and so for Christmas they would save up and really spoil them. But one year, after ordering all the toys and goodies from one online retailer, they realized they’d entered their old address. The company wouldn’t change the address, so they had no choice but to ask the new resident in their old building if they could get the packages.
However, the guy who lived there was a huge grinch. Despite Patriot explaining the situation to him, he refused to return the packages, keeping everything for himself and his own family! Patriot was furious; so, he decided to give this guy a gift that he’d never forget! He staked out the apartment for a few hours, watched him pull up into the complex, and then waited for nightfall. When it was dark, he made his way down to the car and, making sure no one saw him, pulled out some eggs, a can of black spray paint, and a knife. He proceeded to scrawl phrases like “Cheater”, “Homewrecker”, and “fertilize THESE eggs!” all over the car, cracked the eggs on the windscreen, and slashed the tires. Then he crept back to his car and drove off.
Patriot was making it look like the douchebag had gotten someone pregnant, someone aside from his wife! When patriot returned the next day, the car was gone, and noticeably, so was the grinch! The outside of the house looked like someone had been kicked out of it, with items and clothes littering the yard. While there was no way of telling what had gone down for sure, it was the best Christmas gift Patriot could have asked for!
Coming Unglued
Sharing a room with someone you don’t get on with is one thing, but sharing your room with someone who’s downright gross is another, as reddit user stalagit68 discovered way back in the 1980’s. During their college years, their campus paired Stalagit with a roommate who was given a substantial allowance by her parents.
However, she spent all that money partying hard, and, never having any left over for food, would steal Stalagit’s. Seeing the direction this was headed, Stalagit spent most of their time at their nana’s, who lived locally. When they eventually returned, they discovered the roommate had moved in a friend, and together the two of them had completely trashed the room.
It was gross. But technically, Stalagit still lived there, so at the end of the semester when they had to turn the rooms back over to the college, it was Stalagit who was told the room needed to be cleaned. Stalagit told the roommate, but she simply replied “I don’t care”.
So, while her roommate was out one day, Stalagit got to work cleaning out everything, and I mean everything. All their costly makeup and beauty products? Trash. Expensive TV? Trash. The collection of substances stashed around the room? Trash! After removing everything that wasn’t in there before she moved in, and scrubbing the room down, Stalagit then opened every door in the place and applied a strip of sealant down the hinge of each one. Once the inspector was happy, they closed each of the doors behind them, sealing the doors shut! Considering the roommate didn’t know all her stuff had been thrown out, she’d have to break down the door to get in, by which point all the resulting damage would land squarely on her shoulders. Nothing like leaving someone you don’t like in a sticky situation!
Carlton Tavern Revenge
While stories of personal revenge are satisfying, tales of bureaucratic revenge have budget. Case in point, let’s rewind to 2015 and head over to Kilburn in London, England. This was where a pub called the Carlton Tavern was bought by a foreign property investor called Ori Calif.
In April of that year, Ori had the pub demolished in order to make way for an apartment block. There was just one problem, the pub was a Grade 2 listed building. It had originally been built in 1920, replacing an earlier pub that had been bombed by the Germans during the blitz of 1918. It was considered a keystone of the area’s cultural heritage and was remarkably well preserved, so much so that when the charity English Heritage surveyed it, they’d made records of its entire layout so it could be restored in the wake of a natural disaster.
They were about to announce its new protected Grade 2 status in the following days, except a not-so-natural disaster hit the pub, in that it was demolished by its owner. Here’s the thing, even if you own property in England, a building with a protected status can only be changed with very specific planning permission.
And Ori hadn’t gotten that planning permission, hoping that demolishing the pub before it was officially given the Grade 2 status would allow him to build his apartments and sell them on for a quick profit. Needless to say, the government was not happy about this, and wanted to send a message to any other property developers thinking of doing the same thing! And boy, did they. Just a month later in May 2015, the
council ordered Ori to rebuild the pub in the exact way it stood prior to its demolition, brick-by-brick. It's no joke, they had to salvage every brick they could from the demolishment and re-use it to build the pub back exactly up as it was, like the world’s worst jigsaw!
Ori also had just 24 months to complete this restoration, and he wouldn’t be able to sell anything on that land unless he did! Ori immediately tried to appeal against this, but his appeal was overturned! And to put a final nail in the coffin, his planning permission to repurpose the rooms above the pub as apartments was also denied. Rebuilding works commenced in 2017, but it wasn’t until 2021 that it was completed. It’s estimated that the rebuilding efforts cost Ori more than $2 million, alongside a mountain of paperwork. Somehow, the brits achieved nuclear level passive aggressive revenge over a pub. That sounds about right!
You May Now Kiss the Best Man
For personal reasons, my absolute favorite revenge stories are those where cheaters get got. And this next story might be one of my favorites of all time.
It comes from
reddit user UltimateOatie who, back in 2020, was living with her then-fiancé in a house that she owned. However, on Christmas Day, Oatie found out he’d been cheating on her. Disgustingly, he’d told just about everyone else except her, because he was planning on leaving her but was in the process of securing a new residence, apparently the person he was cheating on her with didn’t like him enough to let him move in!
Understandably, Oatie was crushed. But like an absolute champ, she accepted the situation, and patiently waited for him to move out. Only, 3 months later, he was still living in her house. His search for a new residence was non-existent, with him clearly assuming that he could just free load off Oatie and keep living there, while still seeing his other girl! The audacity! Somehow, Oatie took the high road and let this slide, until one day he began swiping on a dating app with his phone volume loudly on. She asked him not to, but he ignored her. This level of disrespect was the final straw, and Oatie decided to give him a taste of his own medicine. She messaged her fiancé’s best friend, a man who would’ve been best man at their wedding, and started flirting. At first it was just to get under her ex’s skin, but eventually the two discovered they actually had a lot in common, particularly how abhorrent they’d found her ex’s behavior. Eventually, the revenge flirting got serious, and they started dating, and with that, Oatie finally kicked the ex out of the house once and for all! With no where to go, he was forced to move back in with his parents. In the meanwhile, Oatie continued dating her new partner for 2 years, until he popped the question, she said yes, and they got married! What started off as a revenge flirt turned into unintentional nuclear-level revenge, marrying her ex’s best friend!
And to make the whole thing even sweeter, the last Oatie heard, her ex had been kicked out of his parent’s house and could never officially date the girl he’d cheated on her with. He probably didn't get a wedding invite either!
Divorce
Back in 2016, a now deleted reddit user, who we’ll call Aaron, posted a story that sounds, frankly, unreal. Aaron was happily married to his wife, who we’ll call Janice, with two kids, when they hit a rough patch. These things happen, but one day Aaron noticed Janice was spending more time than usual on her phone. She said she was messaging her girlfriends, and so he thought nothing more of it.
However, one day, he was charging up an old iPad for his son, when a flurry of Facebook message notifications popped up on the screen. Apparently, his wife had logged into her Facebook account on the iPad some time ago and had never logged out. And that’s when his heart sank. The notifications showed that his wife was messaging another man, let’s call him Dick; she was flirting with him, being downright nasty with him, and making fun of Aaron! Shocked to his core, Aaron watched the barrage of messages in real time, but he didn’t say anything. He spent the next few days thinking, taking screenshots of the conversation, while acting as normal as possible around Janice. Soon, the pair were messaging "I love you" to one another, and that’s when Aaron knew he had to make a plan to get out of there. He contacted a lawyer with all the screenshot evidence he had and began secretly making plans to leave Janice. But then something happened. Dick messaged that he was coming to town for a weekend and had booked a hotel so that Janice could visit him for intimate reasons. Janice was delighted, and quickly lied to Aaron telling him that she and her girlfriends had booked a spa weekend!
Aaron could have confronted her right there, but instead he told her to go and enjoy herself! She packed her stuff and left, with Aaron telling her to have fun. She clearly thought she’d gotten away with it! However, a few hours later, Aaron rolled up to the front desk of the hotel Dick was staying at, and asked the lobby staff if he could call up to Dick’s room. They obliged.
Dick answered the phone, and Aaron told him to send his wife down. But Dick claimed he had no idea what he was talking about, so Aaron mentioned that he knew Dick was also married, as he’d seen on his Facebook profile, and if he didn’t want Aaron to message his wife, he'd tell Janice to come to the lobby. Sure enough, a few minutes later, Janice arrived looking flustered. Aaron then handed her 75 pages of Facebook screenshots in a binder. He revealed he’d actually known what’d been going on for months, that he and his lawyer had drawn up a separation agreement where she’s moving out, that Aaron gets full custody of the kids, that she gets no child support whatsoever, and weekend visitation only. If she doesn’t agree, he’ll send a copy of all those Facebook messages to her entire family, her place of work, and all her friends.
Desperate, Janice started bawling and telling him she was sorry. But Aaron just walked out of the lobby. Within a week, she’d signed the agreement. But to make things easier for the kids, Aaron doesn’t tell them anything about why they’re separating, and agrees she can still come around a few nights a week to maintain a relationship with them. He also agreed to marriage counselling, but after 6 months still requested divorce. Ultimately, he just wanted legitimate proof from a professional that she hadn’t been living in the house for 6 months, granting him an amicable divorce. And because he wanted full custody of the kids, but still wanted to appear like the good guy in all of this, he just so happened to leave his laptop open with the phrase “how to get over your wife cheating” in the search bar. His eldest daughter, a rebellious teenager, found it and immediately put everything together! He pretended she was never meant to see it, but from then on, she refused to talk to her mom.
So, when court statements from the kids were due, the kids both decided to stay with Dad, only visiting their mom on weekends. The divorce was finalized, and Janice apologized again to Aaron, confessing that she’d thrown away her family, her life, everything she cared about by being stupid and selfish. He told her that maybe, one day, they could give it another shot, but that right now, he was just too hurt.
In reality, he was never going to give her another shot, he just wanted to get her hopes up, while he spent the weekends where the kids were at mom’s hosting several friends with benefits. Ultimately, Aaron had gotten the very best divorce settlement possible, and the greatest revenge along with it!
If you were amazed at these stories of nuclear revenge, you might want to read
part 1, part 2 and
part 3. Thanks for reading!
