A SCOTTISH cyber-security student joined efforts to embarrass Donald Trump ahead of his much-hyped but sparsely attended rally in Tulsa this weekend.

The Trump campaign boasted that one million people had registered to attend the rally, but just 6000 attendees showed up to the 19,000-person capacity arena in Oklahoma – a Republican strong-hold where Trump won 65.3% of the vote in 2016.

It later emerged there had been a co-ordinated effort on the video app TikTok, known for its teen dance challenges, to get people to reserve a ticket for the event but not attend. Fans of Korean pop music – known as K-Pop stans – are also understood to have played a role.

One student in Glasgow "stumbled across" the campaign through Twitter but had no idea about the scale of the situation.

Working with friends in the US, she was able to make two reservations for the rally with an American phone number – she didn’t think anything of it until she saw the headlines on Sunday morning, when the Trump campaign was desperately trying to explain the low attendance numbers and backtrack on their boasts from days earlier.

The student said while it had been “quite funny” to see Trump humiliated on such a large scale ahead of the November election, there was a more serious side to it.

“It’s been horrendous for the last four years, but in the last few months it’s just got to a whole different level,” she said, referencing clashes between police and peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters. “So just being involved in harming the campaign in any way, shape or form, even in a tiny little way, I’m up for that.”

The student added that beyond the headlines, the mass-reservations will have a long-running impact on Trump’s re-election efforts.

“These things are notorious for using the data they get through these rallies for targeted donation pleas to Trump supporters,” she explained.

“And now it’s just the thought of this poor data analyst sitting there in front of a computer with a million data points, knowing that most of them are completely useless. That’s wasting time and money for them.”

Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale has since said “leftists and online trolls” didn’t have an impact on the rally attendance because there was no limit on the number of tickets available to request. Other officials claimed there had been 300,000 legitimate sign-ups, but people had chosen not to attend for fear of “violent protests”.

But Democratic representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rejected these excuses online. She tweeted at Parscale, telling him: "You just got ROCKED by teens on TikTok who flooded the Trump campaign w/ fake ticket reservations and tricked you into believing a million people wanted your white supremacist open mic enough to pack an arena during Covid."

The Scottish student responded to Republican claims that what those reserving tickets were doing was unethical. “I don’t think it can be called hacking the campaign, because of how easy they made it,” she said. “It was like 15-year-olds on TikTok.

“If your cybersecurity is so poor that a 15-year-old with no cyber training can mess up your data sense that badly, then that’s on you. That is your problem.”

Recent polls have indicated Trump could well be heading for a big loss at the 2020 US presidential election – with a New York Times/Siena survey yesterday giving Joe Biden a 14-point advantage.

Voters polled gave Trump a low rating for his handling or the virus and protests throughout the US.