BELLEVUE, Wash. - Chad Peterson checks his Facebook page as he walks home from school. Like many teens, it's an integral part of his social life.
"It's really popular. Anyone who's anyone has a Facebook nowadays," he said.
So imagine his shock when Chad discovered someone had taken over his account and was posting racist rants, sexual slurs to more than 500 friends.
"I was a little freaked out," he said.
The imposter even had an online conversation with a female friend's father, lying to him about the two having sex.
"Stuff like that just kind of made me... sick," said Chad. "I was absolutely mortified."
When Chad's mom, Sheila, found out she tried to delete the account, but couldn't. The hacker had changed Chad's password.
"Nobody knew how to stop it," she said.
She tried to call Facebook to have the page taken down but couldn't find a phone number.
"In the meantime this guy keeps posting more and more and it just gets bad," said Chad. "I was pretty worried what people would think about me."
So Sheila did the only thing she could, "lodging a complaint" on the Facebook site.
"And then I sat there and waited. There was nothing else I could do," she said.
She and Chad waited for nearly nearly eight hours before Facebook finally took the site down.
"I'm really angry that the person got into his Facebook page. I'm equally angry at Facebook for taking so long to shut it down," said Sheila.
Internet security expert Allan Kush says with more than 400 million Facebook users this sort of thing is incredibly common and it's usually the result of people sharing their passwords.
While on-line harassment is a crime in Washington, Kush says police often don't take it seriously.
The bottom line: If your account is hijacked, Kush says you're at Facebook's mercy.
"They've got a very, very small customer service staff and it can take days if not weeks to finally get around to your particular case," said Kush.
Fortunately for Chad, it wasn't enough to ruin his reputation, but it is a reminder that on Facebook you never really know who your "friends" are.
A Facebook representative tells us the company prioritizes its responses based on the severity of the threat and that eight hours is a "very fast response time."
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