Last year, Ha-yong Bak, a Korean-American writer, took penis enlargement pills. They seemed to work at first, until he began experiencing a tickling sensation in his crotch that wouldn’t go away.

It turned out the drugs he’d swallowed had actually been eggs.

Worms were growing inside of his dick.

Actually, that never happened. Well, it kind of did. Bak didn’t take dick pills in real life, but he did write a horror tale about someone who did. And he wrote it from his own point-of-view so that the clickbait-y titled story — “I Wish I Never Took a Dick Enhancement Drug Called ‘Max Best Growth’ ” — would seem more believable to readers.

In fact, when I first read Bak’s story on Reddit, I was totally convinced that it was real. The confessional tone of the narrator, the conversational writing style, and the fact that it ended without a resolution, all made it seem like a regular, oversharing internet post.

Little did I know that the subreddit it had been published in — a horror writing forum called No Sleep that has more than 12 million members — only accepts stories that are told in the first-person or as a found journal.

But even if that wasn’t a rule, Bak would probably still be writing his stories that way.

“I try to make it all seem like it could happen,” the 25-year-old told me through Skype from his home in South Korea. “I know a lot of writers who do really awesome monster or Cthuhlu stories and stuff, but I just can’t do it for some reason. I have to make it realistic.”

Not surprisingly, I’m far from being the only reader whom Bak has bamboozled.

“Oh my god, people are fooled all the time,” he said. “I get a lot of people who send me messages on Reddit with concerns or just absolute hatred if my character was a total douchebag.”

It’s easy to see why so many are deceived by Bak’s stories. With titles like “If You See a Facebook Ad for ‘Choices that Matter,’ Avoid It At All Costs,” “Have You Tried Vaping?” and “A Site Called ‘Cash for Confessions’ Has Changed My Life,” how can you not — at least for a second — think they are true? Their believability is heightened even more by the fact that the villains in Bak’s stories are generally fellow humankind or man-made technology.

Most of his tales also tend to end on cliffhangers, so we never know if the main character survives or gets killed — a writing tactic he picked up from John Steinbeck, his favorite author.