In a hilarious development, the nine Nokia shareholders who wrote an open letter outlining a radical plan to oust Stephen Elop, revert to MeeGo and Symbian and sack half the board has been outed as a hoax.

A Twitter update on the official Plan B account now reads: "there are no 'nine young investors', just one very bored engineer who really likes his iPhone."

As obviously some were still unable to believe the terrible truth, another post read: "in case it's not 100% clear by now: #NokiaPlanB is a hoax."

Plan B was the name give to the hoax movement which spawned the open letter before being wound up. The letter is now offline and the URL redirects to the Twitter page instead.

Now, while this is obviously a hilarious stunt by an engineer who clearly has too much time on his or her hands, Nokia head-honchos might do well to take note.

For although the campaign was ditched before it ever really had a chance of taking off, it reportedly managed to accrue hundreds of supporters in the form of disaffected Nokia shareholder.

17 Feb 2011