Episode Details

All of my life I've had problems sleeping and recently it has been a lot worse. I have a lot of anxiety and I thought that maybe clearing my mind and being able to sleep at night might help so I started asking around on Facebook if anyone had any good results on those sleep studies they mentioned applying for. Most of them say they haven't heard back which is really odd given that it was months ago that they sent in the questionnaire. That wasn't promising to me and it sounded like a scam but then I started seeing ads and posts from sleep studies in my Facebook feed and also on my browser windows. The Facebook feeds looked like the ones my friends had so I didn't even bother with those. I just figured either the companies were swamped with requests or maybe they were scams. An acquaintance on Facebook said I should try the one he went to because he did spend a few nights at the sleep study and they hooked him up to all of these cables and sent him the results that he really only got about 2 hours of deep sleep and he should try these sleeping pills the doctor there prescribed to him. He says now he sleeps like a baby and feels rested in the morning although he does have really vivid dreams of doing weird things.I wasn't about to take any pills unless my personal doctor suggested it, but I really wanted some results. I hadn't had a good night's sleep since I can't even remember. Probably the only time I did was during my drinking days but since then I grew up and became a responsible adult with a lot of added stress. I opened the private message my friend sent to me with the URL on it. It wasn't a normal dot com link, it went to a dot T.O. domain which I found rather odd. Several years ago the top level domains from Tonga sold to a lot of people, but I hadn't heard of anyone using them for quite a while. I always thought it was more of a gimmick since they were being sold from the country of Tonga and ended it dot T. O.  instead of dot com. Most of the domains, including this one, didn't have a whois registry which is sketchy, to say the least. I'm not going to tell you the domain name here because I don't want the same thing that has happened to me to happen to you.Like an idiot, I went to this website to check it out. I didn't think my so-called friend would trick me. I mean, I don't know him well enough to really say he's a friend, but we had been virtual friends on that website for many years. He was on my friend's list and liked many of my posts. His friends, occupation, and family members always seemed legit. Maybe he was hacked, I don't know, but the moment I clicked the link his account disappeared or I was blocked. I have no clue. I have tried searching for him under fake accounts and under my real one but his account doesn't show up under any searches at all. I wish it would because I would really like to know what happened to me.Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, so I click on the link and it brings me to a questionnaire with a bunch of general questions including my name, address, and phone number. I enter in that I have a lot of anxiety and it is hard for me to go to sleep at night and I get most of my rest from 5 am until I have to wake up at 7 am to get ready to go to work. It's clearly not enough sleep and I want to figure out how I can get better sleep every night and then also answered a bunch of other multiple-choice questions. Then I hit submit as instructed.A few weeks went by without an answer and I started to think it was like all the rest of the surveys until I received an email giving me directions to the sleep study and that my appointment was in two weeks. I was to be at the address at 9 am prompt and if I was any later than that the appointment would be canceled. So I marked it on my calendar. I was so excited for the next two weeks I really could barely sleep but I suppose I wouldn't have slept anyway.Their address was at this old building that I thought had been abandoned for years in a neighboring town