It took less than a month for Jason Francis to realize that he was not among allies at the so-called Fred Thompson Forum, a website purporting to support the candidacy of the Republican presidential contender.

Maybe it was the site's tagline – "Hope for North America" – that made him doubtful of the forum's legitimacy. Or, the oddly bombastic tenor of his fellow forum members' posts. While Francis was posting thoughtful missives about his candidate's positions, other purported Fred-heads seemed to hold a sinister view of the former senator. A poster named "Chuck Manson," for example, expressed confidence that a Thompson White House would deploy improvised explosive devices in Iraq. "We've got bigger and better (IEDs), and we need to start using 'em! We will not be defeated! We will rule the Middle East!"

After voicing some mild suspicions, Jason Francis finally threw his virtual hands up in the air. "I am now convinced that this site is owned and operated by Ron Paul supporters with the express purpose of discrediting any and all presidential candidates, especially Fred Thompson, without reasoned debate or even relatively polite discussion," he wrote in July. "I have come to this conclusion after finding my posts (not inflammatory or vulgar) removed without a trace and my vote on the Ron Paul vs. Fred Thompson poll reversed."

Welcome to the online house of mirrors that is the 2008 campaign: A growing bag of tricks employed by tech-savvy amateur political operatives now includes a collection of spoofed online forums purporting to support top candidates, while damning them with praise for extreme positions they have never voiced. The operating principle: The best way to undermine a candidate's supporters is to pretend to be one of them.

FredThompsonForum.com is one of a small network of sites with prime domain names, like RudyGiulianiForum.com and MittRomneyforum.com, that have sprung up this year and share uncanny similarities. They use the same forum software, are hidden behind anonymous domain-registration services and are served by the same hosting company with a common internet IP address.

The content is also similar, sometimes featuring posts under the impersonated names of popular political pundits and bloggers, or promoting misleading links to candidate sites that route to YouTube videos attacking them. Most posts adopt the persona of a supporter of the candidate, while offering views that amount to over-the-top parodies of genuine boosters.

"A lot of it is sarcastic, and playing to stereotypical impressions," says Bill Beutler, a senior online analyst with the political consulting group New Media Strategies in Arlington, Virginia. "It is my impression that a majority of people on the (FredThompsonForum.com) board are Ron Paul supporters."

Indeed, Texas lawmaker Ron Paul seems to have escaped the phenomenon. A Ron Paul forum hosted from the same IP address, and with the same layout as the others, is packed with genuine supporters in earnest discussion. The registered owner of that domain did not respond to interview requests from Wired News.

A careful examination of the parody sites makes the often-amusing spoofing apparent. But casual readers or new forum members have sometimes missed the gag, putting the forums on a shaky boundary between parody and deception.

"I think it's very difficult for the members of the public and the media to tell whether this is a joke," says Christopher Soghoian, a graduate student who studies web psychology and fraud techniques at the Indiana University School of Informatics. "If you hang out in any of the legitimate forums like Free Republic, some of the opinions are not so different from these illegitimate forums, where the opinions are just a bit over the top."

Already known to a handful of political bloggers, Wired News learned about the forums last week, after outraging many Paulites by reporting on a flurry of deceptive spam promoting Ron Paul's candidacy. Apparently in retaliation, a RudyGiulianiForum.com member posed as this reporter and posted a message to the forum boasting that the story was a "fake," and had supposedly been written in exchange for payment from Giuliani supporters. "Hopefully, it will help accomplish your goals," the post read, signing off with this reporter's name.

Long-time forum members played along. The message board thread was later deleted, but not before fooling other Ron Paul supporters, one of whom produced a YouTube video offering the spoofed post as proof that Wired News was on Rudy Giuliani's payroll. The video enjoyed wide circulation online (including on Wired Digital's own Reddit news-aggregation site) and had been viewed more than 16,000 times by Monday afternoon.

While most of the posts on the spoof sites fall short of character assassination, Soghoian says the forums could result in damage to a candidate's reputation. In a worst-case scenario, he says, harried television producers could be fooled by the parody comments and take them out of context in a news program. Fox News host Bill O'Reilly did that this summer with comments posted by readers on the leading progressive website DailyKos, Soghoian notes.

Asked whether he had heard of the fake forums, Ron Paul's communication director Jesse Benton said that he hadn't. "There are some good, legitimate communities," he says. "And some hand-wringing goes on in some of them, and there are also the trolls."

Soghoian believes fake websites and spam are just the beginning, in a political season that will be rife with technological shenanigans. He envisions more complex scams unfolding: What's to stop someone from using a call center in India, for example, to phone U.S. voters in certain precincts and deliberately misinform them about election-day logistics?

"The internet will increasingly be used for dirty tricks," Soghoian says. "It just makes perfect sense," because of the ease and anonymity involved. "It used to be people distributing pamphlets, but now you don't even have to go out and hand them out anymore."

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