The UK Parliament's House of Commons Petitions Committee said it removed more than 77,000 fake signatures from a petition that asked the government to consider invalidating the first Brexit referendum and have a second one.
The petition asked officials to implement a rule that, if the Remain or Leave vote tally is less than 60 percent based a turnout less than 75 percent, then there should be another referendum.
The petition has almost 4 million signatures at the moment of writing, and according to a CNN report, it was set up by a man who voted "Leave" in the first referendum. The man created the petition thinking the Leave camp would lose, but now, after the shocking Leave camp won, the petition has been hijacked by the Remain supporters hoping for another chance at a referendum.
There are a lot of people signing the petition from strange IPs
According to The Telegraph, hackers are having their way with the petition. The Petitions Committee said it detected over 39,000 votes coming from Vatican IPs, a city with no more than 800 residents.
There were also over 3,000 signatures from the South Georgia and the Sandwich Islands, an inhabited territory in the middle of the Atlantic belonging to the UK.
Furthermore, there were also 23,000 signatures that came from IPs in North Korea, and 300 from Antarctica. A separate investigation by The Register found similar results, but with 2,735 signatures from Antarctica.
The tech news portal also claims to have seen a steady pace of new signatures, with ten new users signing the petition every second, a rate that's kept even at odd hours like 02:00 or 03:00 AM.
Other countries that contributed a large amount of votes include 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).
4chan trolls make their presence felt once again
While it is normal for UK citizens from those countries to sign the petition using a local IP, Heatstreet claims that 4chan pranksters hijacked the petition voting process.
4chan users posted screenshots of using special scripts to register fake signatures in the recent petition. Some of them said they were from war-riddled countries and only wanted to make a statement that the West's democracy is a joke.
Even if the government's Petitions Committee invalidates a large part of these automated votes, the petition only needs to pass the 100,000-signature mark for the House of Commons to review it, a mark that it did pass a long, long time ago.
We have removed about 77,000 signatures which were added fraudulently. We will continue to monitor for suspicious activity. — Petitions Committee (@HoCpetitions) June 26, 2016
The petitions website has not been hacked. Fraudulent signatures have been and will continue to be removed, to ensure the site’s integrity. — Petitions Committee (@HoCpetitions) June 26, 2016
The petition site is working and secure. We’re monitoring the site to ensure it’s used properly: https://t.co/ZnsiMoQ0PX — Petitions Committee (@HoCpetitions) June 26, 2016