How Vote Leave got rickrolled

The campaign to leave the EU has fallen prey to a prankster who snapped up the voteleave.com website name. It's something all politicians have to contend with

Despite its name, there is one thing the Vote Leave campaign should not have left for so long: registering a domain name. The delay by the anti-EU organisation meant that up to 100,000 people who tried to access voteleave.com, co.uk or .net were rickrolled - redirected to a YouTube clip of Rick Astley's 1987 hit Never Gonna Give You Up. So far, so internet. But this time, the rickrolling is political. Mario Van Poppel, who snapped up the domain name, is a pro-EU campaigner. He says he will only hand it back if he gets 10 minutes with Boris Johnson and a donation made to a charity of his choice.

Carly Fiorina, a former Republican presidential candidate, might sympathise. Despite also being the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, she wasn't tech-savvy enough to avoid a similar mistake. According to news reports, potential supporters who clicked on carlyfiorina.org saw a message reading: "Carly Fiorina failed to register this domain. So, I'm using it to tell you how many people she laid off at Hewlett-Packard. It was this many ..." Following the message were approximately 30,000 frowny emoticons. The post referred to a merger Fiorina had overseen as CEO of HP, which led to redundancies. The site is now a holding page.

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