By Dan Satherley
Greenpeace has owned up to an online prank targeting oil company Shell and its plans to drill for oil in the Arctic.
Website arcticready.com is made to look just like Shell's official website, and provides a tool for making your own Shell advertisements.
Several news sites fell victim to the hoax, including UPI.com which called it a "spectacularly misguided attempt to crowdsource its next offline advertising campaign".
The ads featured scenes from the Arctic such as melting ice, polar bears and oil rigs, with clever captions superimposed.
One featured an Arctic fox with the caption: "You can't run your SUV on 'cute'," followed by the campaign slogan, "Let's go."
Another popular entry featured penguins with the caption: "We'd drill a crippled orphan's spine if there was some oil in it. Let's go."
The site also included a section for kids, including the game Angry Bergs, in which the player has to defend Shell's oil rigs from icebergs by melting them.
"Right now, the polar ice caps of our planet are melting," the kids' section states. "That's bad—but it's also good! That's right! It's bad because our planet needs ice at the poles. But it's good because when the polar ice melts, we at Shell can go up there to get more oil, which can do a whole lot of things.
"Thanks to oil… Mommy and Daddy can drive to the store to buy you new toys; Companies like Mattel can build new toys; Engineers can drive to work to design new, better toys that are even more fun to play with; When you're done with your toys, trucks can take them away to dispose of."
Shell says it is not considering legal action, and is just focusing on its "safely executing our operations". On its official site it provides counter-arguments in favour of drilling in the Arctic.
Earlier this week Greenpeace installed an animatronic polar bear with fake icebergs on the roof of a Shell station in London.
And earlier this month, the group teamed up with British band Radiohead and actor Jude Law for a video targeting Shell.
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