How sophisticated is the Conservatives' digital strategy? If you've stumbled on the 'Cash Gordon' campaign you'd be forgiven for thinking the party has conjured an elite squad of internet wizards out of the ether.

It certainly looks very slick. The Conservatives' official blog yesterday revealed the Cash Gordon campaign attacking the Prime Minister's links to the Unite union, and encouraging supporters to earn 'action points' by reading, donating or tweeting about the campaign, which is built around Facebook Connect.

Which is all very clever. But if this all seems a little too slick - it is probably because the site is based on an off-the-shelf template developed by a US anti-healthcare lobbyist. In the words of @wdjstraw: "Tory #cashgordon campaign brought to you by the team that tried to scupper US healthcare reform. #ToryFail"

Compare cash-gordon.com with noenergytax.com. (Not, as I first said, with Operation Waiting Game, which is rallying supporters against President Obama's healthcare reforms):

Cash Gordon, reports Political Scrapbook, also hosted beside campaign sites Hands Off, which aggregates tweets against healthcare reforms, Americans for the Military's petition against homosexuals in the armed forces and, just for good measure, the Heritage Foundation's attacks against carbon trading legislation. All perfect right-wing bedfellows, but perhaps a little unseemly for the Cameron machine.

Political Scrapbook claims the site cost $15,000, which makes it a fairly expensive decision: "Contrived to herd visitors through a linear series of actions, Cash Gordon rewards users with a system redolent of primary school 'merit points'. Once you've read Michael Gove's bonkers"new militant tendency" speech (described by the FT as "lazy politics") you receive a gold sticker – oh sorry – 25 points. Helping to bombard Charlie Whelan with hectoring tweets (straight out of the #kerryout playbook) gets you 20 points."

@BeauBodOr "Like the fact you get 50% extra points if you're a non-dom on the #cashgordon website." We don't think that's true, but then again...

And lastly, whoever cobbled together the rent-a-crowd site decided not to moderate tweets with the hashtag #cashgordon. Cue carnage:

@OllyBeat "All tweets with #cashgordon appear on Tory campaign website. The sh*t door is open and the nutters are pouring in. See you there..."

• Update: And... cash-gordon.com has been taken down. It now redirects back to conservatives.com. But only after the mischief-makers discovered not only that were Tweets unmoderated but the page was accepting code that let the page be hacked and redirected.

Remarkably, the site stayed up long enough for the situation to escalate from uncomplementary tweets and very naughty language to an amusing picture of 'Dave' Cameron and eventually the inevitable Rickroll/porn hack. As well as a redirect to the Labour Party site.

Bet you won't see an unmoderated hashtag on conservatives.com for a while.