You may have heard rumblings out of London about a “Tobin tax,” or “Robin Hood tax”, that is, a small tax on all financial transactions. Without going into a debate about its merits, you should be able to see easily that it seems like the sort of thing a so-called “vampire squid” would be opposed to, considering the gazillion trades it makes a day, and whatnot.

Someone at GS may well have fired up the WOPR to vote in opposition in an internets poll (h/t eFinancialCareers):

Campaigners for a “Robin Hood tax” watched with alarm as thousands of votes poured into their website, rejecting their proposal for a levy on City wheeler-dealing, to raise money to fight poverty and climate change.

After a bit more investigation, though, the unlikely backlash against the rob-the-rich plan – almost 5,000 no votes against the Robin Hood tax within 20 minutes – turned out to emanate from just two computer servers, one of which was registered to the investment bank Goldman Sachs.

Between 3.41pm and 3.57pm yesterday, little more than 24 hours after the Robin Hood tax campaign’s high-profile launch, supporters noticed a sudden spike in the number of people rejecting the plan in their online poll. More than 1,700 came from a Goldman-registered server, with the rest from what appeared to be a personal address. It was unclear whether the stunt involved an individual or a number of people. Goldman said: “We have just received this information, and we are investigating the matter fully.”

Stuffing internet ballot boxes is nothing new, and it would probably take your average quant all of 30 seconds to write (or Google for) a script that does this. But really, Lloyd. Idle tentacles are the devil’s workshop — shouldn’t you be keeping your squids busy propping up the markets somewhere, instead?