On June 23rd Britain will have a referendum on wheter to stay in or leave the European Union. Britons looking for more information on the arguments of the 'Vote Leave' camp might think they could find it at http://voteleave.co.uk, or perhaps http://voteleave.com or even http://voteleave.eu now that it has been designated as the official Brexit campaign.
But all they will find there is a redirect to this video of Rick Astley's 1987 hit song "Never Gonna Give You Up", often used when tricking people into clicking on a fake link (a.k.a. Rickrolling):
The reason? Check out this Facebook post by Mario Van Poppel, a Belgian expat living in the United Kingdom where he runs a site called Leftovercurrency together with his wife:
I registered the domain name VoteLeave.net a few months ago, because I guessed the Brexit campaign might be called ‪#‎VoteLeave‬. Today we learned that VoteLeave is the designated Brexit campaign. VoteLeave.net .com .org .co.uk ... all redirect to Rick Astley
Never gonna give EU up!
This link documents how many people are being RickRolledhttps://goo.gl/#analytics/goo.gl/dH7jWC/all_time (stats live from today - humble beginnings)
In a conversation with Lead Stories Van Poppel told us he received some very good feedback so far, including several suggestions to do something different with the domains. He was stil thinking about it and talking to a few people but Van Poppel said it is likely a real site or cartoon or list of arguments will appear in the future as the date of the referendum draws nearer.
In the mean time, people looking for the real 'Vote Leave' site can find it here: www.voteleavetakecontrol.org
