Sydney residents plagued with pest control problems have been raising a few eyebrows it seems, with an outdated link on their website in fact directing visitors to a Chinese porn site.
Ask anyone who grew up in the age of the Internet, and they will agree that the ol’ bait-and-switch is an endless source of fun for the juvenile ones among us.
On one hand, there’s the harmless fun of Rickrolling someone, which sees a link in fact direct a victim to the video for Rick Astley’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’. Then, there’s the more disturbing ones, which usually involve harmless-sounding URLs that link to extremely graphic or questionable material.
However, the City of Sydney has become the unintended purveyor of such behaviour, with an information pack about bush rats in fact linking visitors to a porn site.
As News.com.au reports, a pest control fact sheet from the City of Sydney is available from their website, and offers up a number of informative details about pests in New South Wales.
Up until recently though, the file contained an extra paragraph which urged those seeking more information about “Bush Rats and Black Rats [to] please visit the Sydney Bush Rat website at” SydneyBushRats.com.
However, if you were to visit the aforementioned site, you’d instead be sent through a redirect loop before landing on a Chinese porn site that features very little information about rats anywhere on the page.
While the original document on the City of Sydney’s website was first published in 2011, the ensuing years saw the registration on the original site lapse, before being bought by an anonymous individual in China’s Sichuan province.
In a statement to News.com.au, a spokesperson for the City of Sydney says that they “immediately removed the link from our website” after the matter was bought to their attention.
“It appears that the domain of the website in question had expired and was purchased by another business,” he said.
“We have not received any previous complaints about this link, but apologise to anyone who was mistakenly redirected to that website.”
At the time of writing, the Sydney Bush Rats address still links to the pornographic site, and visitors seeking information about rats are urged not to visit it.
