How to trick greedy MPs...

There are a few interesting elements to the Sunday Times' lobbying sting story today besides the story itself.

As reported by the Guardian, the Sunday Times and Dispatches team created a website for a fake consultancy firm called Anderson Perry Associates. You can still see bits of the website in Google's cache, including the address of the company.

A quick Google search of that address - 3rd Floor, 555 California Street, San Francisco - leads to the website of a "virtual office" firm, which rents the floor in order to allow companies to cut their overheads. And according to a Daily Mail story from last week, the fake website was originally registered to the address of a Channel 4 producer. The site is now offline, and a quick whois search shows no useful information.

It also appears as if the team bought sponsored ad listings for the site, as this cached link from Amazon shows. 

Overall, this is far from a watertight example of how to create a fake company online, but apparently it was more than enough to convince nearly a dozen MPs, including ex-cabinet ministers, to spill the beans on their willingness to help rich lobbyists. A tiny bit of social engineering goes a long way.

Some additional points from the story:

• Claire Newell, whose voice you can hear in the video accompanying the story, is well known for being central to the "cash for influence" sting into the Lords last year. It seems amazingly ballsy for them to use her again for this sting.
• There's a delicious quote in the Daily Mail's article last week: "A spokesman for the Labour Party said he did not think that any of its MPs had been approached by Anderson Perry." Try harder next time.

Conrad Quilty-Harper is an Investigative Journalism masters student at City University who blogs at Spalpeen and Twitters @Coneee

Comments

[Jamie]

Good work. Out of interest, how did you find the ad on Amazon? I've not been able to dig that up myself at all.

[Andrew Ampers Taylor]

Their stupidity is unbelievable.

I am a seventy-year old editing a small community online newspaper in Finchley and I would have found out that information if I were only researching for an innocent story. Always check, double check and triple check anything to do with the Internet!

[Morus]

This is the sort of meta-reporting I love - an information-dense account of how the reporting was done, who the characters were etc. Good to see.

[Dave Carter]

"Perry Anderson" is of course the long-standing editor of New Left Review, which any genuine lefty would have spotted immediately.

[Andrew]

No danger of a Blairite knowing that then :-)