Regular visitors will, I’m sure, understand perfectly well why I was intrigued, to say the least, by this post at Ridiculous Politics…
Tonight’s London Evening Standard has uncovered a Tory Party internet scam – Tories have been caught trying to get voters to disclose their voting intentions with a phoney website.
Members of the public have been duped by a website called VoterChoice.co.uk that promises to stop them from being bothered by canvassers. But those who register are then asked to disclose which party they intend to vote for next Thursday.
The site has been deliberately branded to look like the independent free service to stop unwanted callers. At the end people who register are even given a meaningless ‘validation numberâ€.
Labour’s Chair, Hazel Blears said: ‘This is an absolute con, the online equivalent of the Nigerian letter scam purporting to offer something that it clearly does not’
Leaving aside Hazel’s failure to cite the correct type of online scam – what is described is more of a phishing scam than a 419, this is a story that’s certain worth a closer look, and so…
First port of call, naturally, is the site itself – www.voterchoice.co.uk – which appears to have been hastily removed and shows only a 403 error page from its hosts Freeola.net.
Not to worry, because the next port of call is, of course, Nominet’s WHOIS service, in order to identify the owner of the domain name, which turns out to be a Mr Jeremy Kite of Longfield, Kent (near Dartford), who registered the domain on 18th March this year…
Actually, I’ve got that name slightly wrong…
…its not Mr Jeremy Kite
…because his full title is Councillor Jeremy A Kite, the Conservative Leader of Dartford Borough Council and member for the ward of Longfield, New Barn & Southfleet, and here he is on is his official Local Authority web page, on the Dartford Council website.
Loathe as I am to say this due to my disdain for the body in question, this is clearly a matter the merits investigation by the Standards Board for England, not to mention, from the description of the website, a flagrant breach of the Data Protection Act.
To compound Tory embarrassment, Kite’s exposure as the owner of a scam website comes a mere nine days after a visit to the town by Tory Leader, David Cameron, who was pictured taking part in a flytipping clean-up that opposition members alleged had been deliberately staged as a photo opportunity…
And who was it that was called upon to defend Cameron?
Jeremy Kite, the leader of the council, vigorously denied the suggestion that the rubbish had been planted, but admitted that council workers had collected rubbish from a 20m radius on the same site and piled it in a heap before Mr Cameron’s arrival. ‘But I can tell you 100 per cent that the rubbish was on that site and was not brought in,†he said. ‘In fact, we left it there a day longer than it should have been because we knew Cameron was coming’
I wonder if Kite found the time to show Cameron his new website as well?
