List of successful rickrolls

A rickroll is a bait-and-switch prank that takes the victim to a video of Rick Astley singing "Never Gonna Give You Up". A successful one is when it catches the victim by surprise, often for humorous effect. While there have been many attempts and quite a few successes, this list has the ones that have been covered in major news sources.
Church of Scientology protests
In connection with the online meme, "Never Gonna Give You Up" was played and performed at most of the Project Chanology February 2008 protests against the Church of Scientology. On 10 February 2008, protests in New York City, Washington, D.C., London, St. Louis, Detroit, and Seattle, protesters played the song through boomboxes and shouted the phrase "Never gonna let you down!", in what The Guardian called "a live rick-rolling of the Church of Scientology". In response to a website created by Scientologists showing an anti-Anonymous video, Project Chanology participants created a website with a similar domain name with a video displaying the music video to "Never Gonna Give You Up". It also showed a fan with a "Scientology Kills" sign and the EWU mascot, Swoop, holding a "Xenu.net" sign, both references to the Anonymous Scientology protests.
The New York Times originally reported that a single game had actually been interrupted by the rickrolling. On 27 March 2008 it issued a correction clarifying the situation, and saying that the interruption never took place, but was rather a hoax by Pawl Fisher, a student; Davin Perry, who shoots game videos for the university; and Dave Cook, the university's sports information director.
New York Mets
On 4 April 2008, many web communities, starting with Fark.com, urged their readers to vote "Never Gonna Give You Up" for the 8th inning sing-along at Shea Stadium for the New York Mets season. The Mets posted a web poll to select a song, and left a blank field for write-ins. The Mets organization announced On 7 April 2008 that "Never Gonna Give You Up" was the winner with more than five million votes. The Mets decided not to commit to using Astley's song and subsequently announced a run-off among six songs that would be played at Shea Stadium for the next six games, starting with "Never Gonna Give You Up" on 8 April 2008.
MLB.com later reported on the game, claiming "Never Gonna Give You Up" was played as a "result of fans rigging the vote in favor of Astley, all part of a universal Internet phenomenon known as Rick Rolling". The song was played during the home opener and was greeted with "a shower of boos".
April Fools' Day, 2008
On April Fools' Day 2008 and the following weeks, numerous seemingly uncoordinated instances of rickrolling appeared on the Internet, and news media. All of the featured videos on YouTube's front page hyperlinked to the rickroll. The prank began with international YouTube portals before appearing on the main site.
Social blog website LiveJournal announced on the same day that they would be adding a new member to their Advisory Board, linking members to the journal "rickastley", which contains a rickroll.
The website Fark featured a link to a video claiming to be a blooper reel for the Muppets but instead linked to a video of Beaker performing Rick Astley's song (to a video of him originally performing "Feelings" on The Muppet Show). Other social bookmarking sites such as Digg and Reddit subsequently joined in linking the video.
The online Web store ThinkGeek advertised on their front page a Betamax to HD DVD converter device. In the product page a demonstration video was linked which was, in actuality, a rickroll.
Dan Kaminsky
In April 2008, security expert Dan Kaminsky demonstrated a serious security vulnerability by setting up rickrolls on Facebook and PayPal.
Michelle Obama
On 7 June 2008, a number of political blogs, including Wonkette, Andrew Sullivan, and Balloon Juice, posted an article claiming to show Michelle Obama going on a rant full of racist references to "Whitey", but the video was actually a rickroll.
Barack Roll
Hugh Atkin, an Australian lawyer and notable producer of Internet viral videos, created a popular YouTube parody video of the rickrolling meme involving U.S. President Barack Obama, the then 2008 presidential candidate for the Democratic Party, and a Senator from Illinois, entitled "Barack Roll" that has been watched over seven million times since its release. The original video has since been muted due to an unauthorized soundtrack, although, as usual in such cases, many copies of the video have been re-uploaded by other users. The video consists of clips of Obama speaking the words of Astley's song and scenes of his appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. A follow-up video shows Senator John McCain being "Barack Rolled" at the Republican National Convention, though it never happened; the "Barack Roll" image was displayed on the giant blue sky background that was behind John McCain during parts of his speech, and the video was pieced together from footage of the event. The video ends with what looks like the delegation cheering while chanting Obama's name. This version won the Favorite User Generated Video award at the 35th People's Choice Awards.
It was highlighted on blogs for the New York Times, The Politico, Comedy Central, Andrew Sullivan and Sports Illustrated. Writing for Time magazine's 2009 Time 100 issue, Astley himself mentioned the video in his writeup for 4chan founder moot.
2008 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade
On 27 November 2008, Astley participated in a live rickroll during the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade while the Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends characters were singing "Best Friend", the theme from the 1970s TV series The Courtship of Eddie's Father. Midway through the song, Astley emerged from the float and began to lip sync his signature hit for the crowd. At the end of Astley's performance, Cheese (a character from Foster's) shouted out "I like Rickrolling!"
2008 Christmas Facebook campaign
On 1 December 2008, a campaign known as the "Ultimate Rickroll" was started on Facebook in an attempt to make the song the 2008 in the UK in what was described as an attempt to rickroll the country during Christmas. The campaign's purpose was to stop The X-Factor from gaining the #1 Christmas spot, thereby ending the show's chain of success.
The group attracted nearly 30,000 people in its first week active. Campaigners were encouraged to get as many people as possible to download the song from iTunes between 15 and 20 December 2008. The song only managed to peak at #73; however, this was later found to be a deliberate lowering of the song's place (having reached #3 a week before it came to its finish) due to the company's belief that "the songs ranking was ridiculous and rigging a contest was unfair on other artists".
Nancy Pelosi
On 13 January 2009, in honor of the new YouTube hub for Congress, U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi uploaded a video called "Speaker Pelosi Presents Capitol Cat Cam" to her official YouTube channel. She described it as "a behind the scenes view of the Speaker's Office in the U.S. Capitol". The video depicts cats roaming around the office. A rickroll occurs approximately halfway through the video.
iPhone worm
In October/November 2009, a worm designed to infect jailbroken iPhones changed the wallpaper of infected phones to a picture of Rick Astley overlaid with the text "ikee is never going to give you up".
Oregon House of Representatives
In February 2010, a bipartisan group of Oregon Representatives conspired to do a phantom rickroll during House sessions. Each of the conspirators was given a portion of the lyrics of Never Gonna Give You Up to work unobtrusively into their statements during legislative discussion. This scheme was finally revealed on April 1, 2011, when a video, edited by Representative Jefferson Smith and his co-conspirators, was released of the various representatives making their statements, put in proper lyrical order.
White House Twitter feed
On 27 July 2011 officials managing the White House Twitter feed responded to a message that the feed was dull, writing "Sorry to hear that. Fiscal policy is important, but can be dry sometimes. Here's something more fun," followed by a link to Never Gonna Give You Up.
Others
* A rickroll flash mob took place on 11 April 2008, in London's Liverpool Street train station with an estimated 300-400 people in attendance. When the flash mob finished the countdown, they sang the song from beginning to end.
* One Web site, Prankdialer.com, offers a Rickroll-by-phone service, allowing visitors to enter a phone number to be called and have the song played to the answering party.
* The MIT dome was hacked on September 9, 2009, to show a giant set of the first notes of "Never Gonna Give You Up".
* As part of promotion for their title ', Electronic Arts sent wooden boxes to several video game websites, including The Escapist, Destructoid and Chud.com. Each box contained a hammer and a pair of goggles, and when opened, the box would play the Rick Astley song on a continuous loop. The only way to stop it was to destroy it. After doing so, the recipient would then find a scroll claiming that he or she was damned to Hell for committing the sin of Wrath.
* Microsoft dealt with people abusing the free Wi-Fi at its 2009 Brisbane TechEd conference with BitTorrenting by redirecting local DNS results for the top BitTorrent trackers to a local web server containing some Rickroll scripts.
*In May 2008, there was a flashmob in Baltimore Inner Harbor which included 50 people singing "Never Gonna Give You Up".
*Google.com's Google Labs Book NGram Viewer, a phrase-trending graph of searched terms, displays the YouTube video if the term "Never Gonna Give You Up" is searched for.
*On 11 January 2012, the Occupy Pittsburgh movement said they will play "Never Gonna Give You Up" if confronted by authorities.
*In FM, in the end of the first episode, Chris O'Dowd's character, while pretending to be a skillful DJ and failing, accidentally Rickrolls the crowd in the club in which he is performing.
*CIND-FM, a radio station in Toronto, Ontario started stunting on 25 July 2013 with a repeating loop of "Never Gonna Give You Up" on both the FM frequency and their existing online stream. Six days later, they went into a "soft launch" of their alt-rock format.

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