A Twitter user has passed themselves off as the communications department of beleaguered oil giant BP, with a series of tongue-in-cheek tweets about the current oil crisis and racked up more than 35,000 in the process — many more than oil giant’s official voice.

Astoundingly, the fake PR department, which tweets under the moniker BPGlobalPR, has loads more followers (35,384) while BP America’s actual account only has 5,409.

It is difficult to stop fake accounts, but it does seem an oversight by BP not to have registered the BPGlobalPR name or similar ones, but BP and the rest of us are all on learning curves here. So next time. You have to wonder why its genuine PR department or agency did not scour all possible permutations of the terms ‘PR’ and ‘BP’, so that should one become active, they could monitor its tweets and respond accordingly? No, apparently not.

But then again, most people reading the tweets are not going to be fooled into thinking that they’re genuinely being made by BP’s communications people. The posts are clearly (non-too-subtle) satire.

For example: “Doing our best to turn oil into oilade. So far the stuff tastes TERRIBLE.”

And: “The good news: Mermaids are real. The bad news: They are now extinct. #bpcares.”

The use of the fakehastags has been interesting as well as #bpcares we have also had #BPbelievesinmagic. Whether that is black magic is unclear. The fake feed has also begun offering t-shirts carrying the BP Cares slogan. At $25 a pop they7 are not cheap — but whoever is behind the joke is passing the cash on to a good cause with the proceeds going to healthygulf.org.

In spite of the crude oil-blackness of the humour that permeates the posts, some followers were offended by some of the comments, believing them to be made by BP itself.

This one in particular raised the hackles of some followers: “If we had a dollar for every complaint about this oil spill, it wouldn’t compare to our current fortune. Oil is a lucrative industry!”

That some people think this is actually BP’s PR stance over this disaster probably says more about people than it does about social media.That said, the popularity of the account is testament to how easy it should be for a company to enter into crisis management mode using, among other media, social media.

On being approached by The Wall Street Journal, a BP spokesman said that the company is aware of the BPGlobalPR account (which is encouraging), but added: “It’s a shame, but obviously people are entitled to their views.” Which to me seems like a rather dignified, but rather limp response.

The debacle highlights some of the challenges that companies face when using social media in a crisis; and how if they believe they will ever have complete control over what’s being said about them (even by people pretending to be them) then they are possible fantasists.

It also hightlights the need for Twitter to rollout its verified accounts to business (it is still in beta), so that users know they are following the genuine article and not some joker. This would be a major advantage to BP so that the Twitter accounts BP America and Oil_Spill_2010, which have 4,500 and 5,300 followers respectively, are known as genuine BP accounts.

Putting things into some kind of perspective, BP faces bigger threats to its image than the jibes of @BPGlobalPR. But by appearing to ignore the account’s influence and by not countering its ridiculous claims, one thing is clear – that BP’s (real) PR team needs to rethink its PR strategy and start taking social media satirists seriously.