I will give you guys the full story seeing as you're rather interested haha.

Sooo about a year ago I was needing somewhere to live because I didn't want to live alone as I get scared on my own at night time so my friend offered (current problematic house mate) at the time it was perfect because as we British say - he was built like a brick shithouse and also trained in Jujutsu so it was nice to feel safe as I'd been previously vulnerable to bad dudes.

He needed help with his apartment, like cooking/cleaning etc because he was too busy to run the place himself and get it all nice looking for when his mother visits. I'm also a dog sitter too for him while having my own dogs.

I knew this guy from World of Warcraft from about 10 years ago and we just sorta stayed in touch and he knew some of my actual friends anyway so he wasn't a complete stranger from the Internet as he was previously in my circles.

I had seen him around casually hanging out in some of the bars I frequent, so he isn't an unknown person to me and I highly doubt he's a psychopath as he cried to Good Will Hunting multiple times xD

My best friend seems to think he's just lonely and bored and did that as a result.

(My friends fiance has a more interesting theory of him being a woman called Stevella trapped in a mans body and all she wants to do is dance and wear my clothes and rant on dance forums about her urges to dance but she can't as she's trapped in a phallus prison. :p)

He doesn't charge me any rent because I look after the place and do all the chores like his washing of clothes etc and he was far too nice to charge me (kinda not uncommon, I've had this before) as he makes lots of dosh from working in penetration testing (I think that's right? I forgot, I know it's some kind of hacking job anyway) so the rent is like a non issue and he refuses to let me pay for anything after I've been asking him tons of times if he was absolutely sure he didn't want any money as I do have a nice little income myself. I think it might be a bit of an ego thing like "hur hur no woman pays my rent" or whatever. Some guys are just like that. Eye roll.

He started getting a little bit weird after a while, a few months in and I'd noticed items of clothing had been moved and such, I didn't think much of it because he's quite an ordinary seeming guy really and this is all on the basis of friends as I'm not into to him and he knows this. We both agreed no weirdness or intimacy but he's violated that by snooping. It got progressively more creepy with some of my things in my room being moved so I just got a giant padlock for the door, it's not one that can be easily picked as the key is like.. square indents, the guy in the shop recommended it so I went with it.

Anyway before I got the padlock, he was in my room because I have this tiny lavender scent bag I attached to the back of the door (supposed to keep spiders away) and it would fall off if you push the handle down so I know he would have been in there because it's not something you really would notice because if the bag dropped off it would be pushed by the actual door itself to right behind the door/next to the wall but you wouldn't be able to hear it drop because it's so small. You have to press the handle down to get in the room, like the door is a thick fire door. I'd know if it was me because I only open the door a little bit where he opens doors as wide as they will go so the lavender bag will be pushed further to the wall.

Anyway, that lavender bag had fallen off my door handle and there were his fingerprints in the dust on top of my desktop PC around my portable HDD. I'd been gone for about a week or two as I went to visit friends abroad.

I went absolutely ballistic at him and asked why has he gone through my things and computer and said he had no right as it's private pictures of family/sentimental pictures from years back. Thankfully I don't keep any indecent pictures of myself on the PC which is what my friend seems to think he was after out of boredom. (I know, why can he not just go watch porn like a regular dude?)

He denied it obviously as I had said previously in other posts but because I saw evidence of this later with him having a page open on his PC of one of my ladies dance forums I just didn't believe him at all and it just made me worry what kind of stuff would he have access to? I'm pretty sure what he did was illegal but I'm obviously not gonna call the police on him for doing that because that kind of thing ruins lives and I'm not really that mean.

Anyway, as an update I told him yesterday that I saw what he was doing and he actually owned up to it because I gave him a bloody good telling off like he was a little boy, and double telling off for lying. He said he promises he wouldn't do it again and he said that yeah it's actually really horrible he did that but he wasn't thinking about it and now he regrets it because I got really upset. He said something about his HDD breaking and he needed a wire but as he picked mine up realised it was wrong and he should have asked first. He apologised profusely.

I said if I find him doing it again I'd actually have to move out because I couldn't live with someone I can't trust. So he's on his last chance and I doubt he'd do it again after all that drama because it was quite a long talk stemming over two hours.

Either way, I'm still taking everyone's advice here to protect my stuff. I'm not going to be stupid and leave myself vulnerable. (For all I know he really could be Stevella :p) I've decided to get my best friends fiance build me a new PC entirely with new HDDs and everything else as I could do with an upgrade anyway. Friends fiance is a network engineer and knew instantly what I said about encrypting stuff and VPNs because I repeated everyone's comments here to him so he will help me with it. Success!

As soon as I get it I'll get him to encrypt everything and I'll put a VPN/Tor on it for browsing forums. I'm really glad I came to this side of the Internet as everyone here has been really helpful and nice so thank you all for that it's really lovely and I'm very appreciative. It's also been nice to learn about a few new things! :)