Let me preface my answer by saying that at 39 years old, I've been online for going on 25 years. We're talking pre-Web, back in the days of Compuserve and Prodigy. I grew up online, and as a kid it was arguable that I had more online friends than real life ones.

Now, credentials out of the way, there's two ways to answer your question. Pessimistically speaking, yeah, there's plenty of reason to be paranoid these days. It is, unfortunately, not unheard of for "online stalkers" to go real life and show up at a person's door. I have a friend of a friend going through this right now who was ganged up on in a political forum and now fears for her safety from all the real life threats she received.

But, I ask...why? People don't typically get randomly targetted for such things. She was doing the typical "I'm anonymous so therefore I will be a complete jerk in this other personality" thing that so many people do, and she got called out on it. She thought that being online and anonymous meant she could do whatever she wanted. Wrong. There's other people out there too, you know. And maybe some of them take it personally. But it could just as easily be the case where you're the one being honest and truthful, but the person you've been talking to has been lying through his teeth. I can't count the number of times I've heard the old "I met the perfect guy online...." story that turns bad.

I run a site about Shakespeare. I talk about my real life. Somebody once freaked out that I did that, saying that she would never ever link her online existence to her real life and took great pains to make herself un-Googlable. After Googling her and calling her by her real name ( :) ), I simply pointed out that I'm the same person online that I am in real life, and I think the odds of somebody stalking me for my feelings on Cymbeline are probably pretty slim.

More optimistically? If you've met somebody online who you really think could be a friend/romance, but you're terrified to meet in real life? That's different, that's more about classic insecurity. In real life, we're all about the physical. What you look like is the first thing people judge, whether they acknowledge it or not. My personal favorite is women who say things like "I don't date men shorter than me." Like I can change that. So I could be perfect in every other way, but height rules me out.

With your online friends, all that physical insecurity is put aside, and you're just two personalities finding a connection. It's no wonder that, at least in the early days before everybody got all paranoid, that people would tell you their online friendships were more real than their offline ones (I was certainly one of those). In real life you talk about sports and the weather and how's the job going. Online you talk about anything and everything you've ever felt, or wanted to know.

...and then comes the prospect of meeting online, and all that physical insecurity stuff comes back to the spotlight and you have to wonder if there'll be a deal breaker in there somewhere. Maybe it's not just appearance, maybe it's any number of other things you didn't talk about, but suddenly show up when you meet. Maybe it turns out there's just no chemistry after all.

It really depends on how much is at stake. What's going to happen in your life if you meet up with somebody and it doesn't go well? Do you care all that much? I think that scared comes in the flavors above - legitimately paranoid that there are real life dangers to consider, or "what if they don't like me" insecurity. These days, the former is probably the bigger concern.

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