Brexit data gurus ‘faked voters’ email accounts’
THE secretive Canadian IT firm at the centre of the Vote Leave spending and donation controversy was also involved in an election scandal in its home town last month.
There was uproar when it emerged that AggregateIQ (AIQ) created more than 1,300 ‘fake’ email accounts in the contest for the Liberal Party leadership in the province of British Columbia.
The data firm, hired to work for candidate Todd Stone, created email addresses in bulk attached to a domain name they set up to be given to 1.349 new party members the Stone campaign had signed up, mainly non-English speaking Chinese who had no email accounts of their own. Party officials stepped in when they realised that if Stone’s campaign controlled the email accounts, rather than the members, they could theoretically also rig the votes in the online poll.
A source in the Liberal Party – whose leader Justin Trudeau is Canadian Prime Minister – told the Mail on Sunday: ‘It was ham-fisted and looked bad, certainly creating the impression that something was underhand, even if it wasn’t.’
The row broke out days before the vote and rivals called for Stone to be disqualified. He lost anyway.
Since AIQ was set up in 2014 it has been based in British Columbia’s capital Victoria, but there was little sign of the firm last week. Its headquarters was deserted. The landlord said it suddenly left two months ago.
Its website had carried a quote from Vote Leave’s Dominic Cummings saying: ‘We couldn’t have done it without them [AIQ].’
That has disappeared. Now it says: ‘AggregateIQ works in full compliance within all legal and regulatory requirements in all jurisdictions where it operates.’
So why HAS AIQ data firm behind EU poll win vanished?