'Shocking excuse of a human being' - Irish viewers baffled by Netflix's 'Unknown Number'

Irish viewers have been left baffled by a brand new Netflix documentary that sees a 13-year-old girl and her boyfriend horrifically cyber bullied for months on end by someone you would never guess.

I have not been able to stop thinking about this twisted documentary since I watched it over a week ago. This gripping true story had a disturbing plot twist that I never saw coming in a million years. 

*Warning* This article will contain major spoilers!

The Unknown Number: The High School Catfish is currently the number one film on the streaming platform in Ireland, and there's a very good reason why.

The thrilling show centres around a teenage couple from Michigan in America, who were victims of serious cyberbullying for over a year from an unknown number. 

As the messages were read out one by one during the course of the hour and a half film, I was left more and more disgusted by the anonymous texter.

13-year-old Lauryn Licari and her boyfriend at the time Owen McKenny were bombarded by horrific messages every single day and night.

Some of the messages told Lauryn that her boyfriend Owen didn't want her and tried to break the couple up, others were focused on making Lauryn feel horrible about herself.

One message said: "You are worthless and mean nothing, you never have...get a life out of here...Owen will never look at you again."

The messages also started to get sexual, with vulgar messages that were sent to Lauryn about her boyfriend that would genuinely make your stomach turn. Especially when you discover who the the cyberbully really is.

Towards the end of the film, detectives working on the case figure out that the messages being sent come from Lauryn's mother's phone.

When this was first revealed I was very confused. I thought to myself, "how did the cyberbully pull that off?". Surely she was being framed?

Until I realised...it is actually Lauryn's mother who was cyberbullying her own daughter for months on end. My jaw dropped to the floor. I was sick to my stomach. And so were other viewers on Netflix.

People were also baffled because at the end of the show, FBI confront the mother in their home and the daughter looks shell shocked the whole time. While her father ends their relationship straight away, Lauryn lets her mother hug and console her while she has a blank, eerie look on her face.

She also said that she will still still have a relationship with her mother and loves her no matter what. Irish viewers have contemplated why she reacted the way she did, and have taken to social media to give their thoughts on the chilling story.

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One comment on Facebook said: "I think the mother was jealous of her child and fancied the boyfriend because I could never understand why any mother would do that to their child".

"How the daughter can have anything to do with the woman (mother or not) is beyond belief. I can’t imagine sending such vile vitriol and threats to a child let alone your own daughter, and on top of that allowing teenage children to be bullied and taking the blame for her actions, her reasoning was lame at best….shocking excuse of a human being," another person said.

Another shocked viewer said: "This was mind blowing. I don’t know what is more disturbing, the mother’s actions or the daughter’s eagerness to have a relationship with her after what she did".

Unkown Number: The High School Catfish is still available to stream now on Netflix