Parliamentary authorities have removed around 77,000 allegedly fake signatures from an online petition which calls for a re-run of the Brexit referendum – with hackers taking responsibility for adding thousands of counterfeit names.
It follows a formal inquiry launched less than three hours earlier, amid claims some of the more than three million signatures it has gained since Friday may be fraudulent.
A statement posted on the House of Commons’ petitions committee Twitter account on Sunday afternoon said: “We are investigating allegations of fraudulent use of the petitions site. Signatures found to be fraudulent will be removed”.
It came as the ‘EU Referendum Rules triggering a 2nd EU Referendum’ petition posted on the UK Government and Parliament Petitions website showed a suspicious number of signatures attributed to places outside the UK – in some cases more than their total population.
Some 39,411 residents of Vatican City, home to Pope Francis, appeared to have signed the petition by Sunday morning, despite the tiny city state having a total population of just 800.
In isolationist North Korea, one of the least internet-connected countries in the world, 23,778 people had apparently gone online to express their frustration at the UK’s decision to quit the EU.
Located 800 miles south east of the Falklands, and with a permanent population of zero, the South Atlantic British Overseas Territory of South Georgia and the Sandwich Islands was responsible for more than 3,000 signatures
That was some 300 more than those coming from the British Antarctic Territory, which though home to some 400 researchers also has no settled population of its own.
Signatories are also recorded in places as far flung as the Caribbean island of Aruba (101), Bermuda (564), China (432), Hong Kong (2,089), Japan (742) Venezuela (24) and the South Pacific Islands of Tuvalu (18), Wallis and Fortuna (8) and Vanuatu (31).
Overall, close to 2.5 million signatures had been added from within the UK by midday on Sunday, making up an overwhelming proportion of the whole.
What is not clear is whether the results recorded are an accurate reflection of the places from which signatures were added.
Savvy internet users could simply have disguised their true locations by using proxy servers to hide their IP addresses.
There have also been suggestions computer coders may have used special script or a ‘bot’ to generate fake signatures automatically.
Web archive records show the number of signatures connected to IPs in the United Kingdom leaping from 365,483 at 9.21pm on June 25 to more that 2.4 million by 11.01pm.
Hackers in online chatroom 4Chan have even been boasting about their part in the ‘prank’.
If true, the discovery is bound to raise serious concerns about the government’s cyber-security, while potentially undermining the legitimacy of future petitions.
Either way, people purportedly living in countries left behind by the vote also appear to have added their name to the petition in significant numbers.
They included 18,734 signatures from France, 11,816 from Spain, 7,031 from Germany, 3,139 from the Netherlands and 2,492 Italians and 4,122 residents of Gibraltar – which came out strongly in favour of Remain in Wednesday’s momentous poll.
Some 2,326 Swiss-based supporters backed a second referendum on EU membership, as did 279 residents of Turkey, 3,746 in New Zealand and 11,971 in Australia.
Support was less pronounced in Western Sahara (3) Mongolia (3), Somalia (4), Guatemala (4) and French Polynesia (6)
And the data reveled solitary Remain supporters in such far-flung locales as Bhutan, Burundi, Cape Verde, Chad, Djibouti, Eritrea, Guyana, Niger, the Marshall Islands and Mauritania.
However there can be little doubt they have helped swell the number of names added to the online document to well past the 100,000 needed for it to be debated in Parliament.
The petition was started, ironically, by Leave voter William Oliver Healey more than a month ago, when polls suggested a win for Remain.
On Sunday he posted a statement on his Facebook page which attempted to distance himself from it.
He wrote: “Due to the result, the petition has been hijacked by the remain campaign. Admittedly, my actions were premature however, my intentions were as stated above.
“THERE WAS NO GUARANTEE OF A LEAVE VICTORY AT THAT TIME!!! Having said that, if it had not been mine, it would have been orchestrated by someone on the remain campaign.
“I believe what we need to do now for the good of the country; is get behind the will of the British people, unite, issue Article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon and move forward, with the process of leaving the European Union”.
A Petitions committee spokesman denied any evidence of hacking, but admitted that unprecedented demands had been placed on the website over the last few days.
“The apparent leap in the number of signatures was simply the result of the published data being updated less frequently than usual,” she said.
“The petitions website has not been hacked, and there has been no manipulation of data behind the scenes. Fraudulent signatures have been and will continue to be removed, to ensure the site’s integrity”
Around 200,000 supporters of the Labour leader have added their names to a petition entitled A Vote of Confidence in Jeremy Corbyn After Brexit.
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Source: Telegraph