In Which We Use Our Mad L337 Haxor Skilz

I am peeing myself laughing. Seriously.

It didn't get to be popular until after I graduated from college, so I missed out on most of the fun, but I do have an account on Facebook. So does my brother, and a number of people I know from college, though most of us now have accounts associated with our graduate schools. Recently, Facebook stopped requiring a college e-mail and just let anyone sign up to join. This week my dad, who is a professor, found out that some of his students had created a fake profile for him on Facebook. It was obviously fake because our last name was spelled incorrectly. My dad asked, "What does it say? Can you see it?" I said I couldn't. You had to ask my fake dad to add you as a friend in order to see the page. I doubted they would add me, since it was blatantly obvious that I was related to him. Nevertheless, I said I would attempt to infiltrate the page. Apparently, the kids who made it were not the brightest bulbs in the box. They added me as a friend, giving me access to the page. There wasn't a lot to it, but some things were mildly offensive. I mentioned it to my brother tonight before dinner. He said, "I'm going to add them." I told him not to, because two of us might tip them off that we were onto them. And besides, maybe they just added me because I'm a cute girl. (Which was their FIRST mistake. Heh.) I gave my brother my account info so he could sign in as me and see for himself. Then I went to cook stir fry.

I get done eating dinner, and the phone rings. It is my brother. Seems our darling community college students put the dumbest password ever on the Facebook account, and Bryan guessed it on the second try. It gets better. They made the mistake of using the same password for the Yahoo e-mail address they used to set up the fake profile of my dad. My brother wastes no time in changing both passwords to something only we would know. So basically, we own them. They are locked out of both accounts. We own their entire identity. I feel no moral qualms whatsoever over this because it was a fake identity to begin with. And they messed with the clan.

The question became what to do with our dad's fake profile. Clearly, we now owned their account. We had to fuck with them. Immediately we went in and deleted all the stuff we found borderline offensive. Like the pictures of the Rockstar energy drink and the Hooters Girls. We left the rest of the pictures, except we changed the captions to make fun of the students who made the site. It was clear who had made the site because they added themselves as friends. They were, in fact, my fake dad's only friends. They had put a picture of N Sync in their album. Bryan went and tagged the picture with the kids' names. (When you tag people in a photo album, it sends them a nice little email, which makes this even more amusing.) I said, "We should make an album of really, really lame pictures and tag them in it. Except I'm trying to think of something gayer than N Sync... but it's just not coming." Hey, we're not the ones who put the N Sync picture on there. Fitting, indeed. We changed our fake dad's "Current Status" to "laughing an evil laugh." We added a couple of activities (Hacking. Kicking Ass. Taking Names. Failing Moronic Students.) I threw in some stupid hacker speak. Then we added ourselves as friends and wrote notes on our fake dad's wall, agreeing with the previous notes that, yes, it was a fine site indeed.

We also made a group, titled it "I Tried to Make a Fake Profile for my Prof But Got Shut Down by Hackers," complete with a picture (see left), a group description that says "You all got owned," and we set ourselves up as the administrator, and gave ourselves the title "L337 HAXOR #1." Then we personally sent them all invitations to join our group.

Mike pointed out that if they had secret password questions, they could get back their accounts. We changed the password prompt on the Facebook account to something only we would know. But the Yahoo account proved more difficult. They used "What is your birthday?" Well, their fake profile for our dad listed a birthday of 1/2/55. We went for that. Score. Except there was a second question. "What make was your first car/bike?"

"Fuck," types my brother on IM. And then, a few seconds later, "These guys have sunk to a new low of retardation."

They used our dad's car.

We finally had to stop. But I can't help dropping in every 20 minutes to admire our work and giggle helplessly over it. It is just that beautiful. Of course, we'll probably just delete the account once we've had our fun. But I hope it confuses the hell out of them. (We suspect it's a couple of them getting a laugh out of pretending to be our dad, which would explain why the password was so easy.) I hope they're like, "Dude! Who changed the page? Dude! It wasn't me! What the--??" It is pretty obvious from our snarky comments that it was us. But I likened it to my favorite scene in the movie The Sting, which I happened to watch a couple of weeks ago. The gangster's guy fumes, "I KNOW I gave him four threes! He had to have made a switch!" And Lonnigan snaps back, "What was I supposed to do? Call him for cheating better than me in front of the others?" There's no way these kids can report us for stealing their identity. Because they stole our dad's first.

Our dad has not seen "his" fake site. He doesn't really need to, now. He was going to try and have it deleted by the Facebook administrators. It's not necessary.

...We'll just tell him we took care of it. ;-)