Rapper T-Pain posted a curious tweet last month. He claimed that someone had launched the fucktpain.com website, perhaps to mock or troll him. So he decided to do something else. “I simply purchased it from them and now all the profit comes to me. Got it? So buy it up!! I’d appreciate it,” he tweeted, adding in a cry-laugh emoji for good measure.

Clicking on the link leads you to a site that has a backdrop of screengrabs from Twitter of real people slating T-Pain. There’s @Spistella saying, “tpain is a terrible artist and he is the ugliest creature on the planet.” Or there’s @ KrazySexyKool87 asking, “Is it just me or does Tpain seem as if he has terrible breath? Smh…” Or @CINAbun and the very direct, “tpain is trash.” It’s all pretty harsh stuff.

Overlaid on the page is a button saying “—> FUCK IT <—” and when you click on it you are led to an online shop selling T-shirts with different slogans on them (“Auto Tune Sucks”, “Fuck T-Pain”, “T-Pain sucks”). They are all selling for $24.99 each and there are multiple designs all along the same theme. That really stuck it to the trolls, right? Well, not all of them: T-Pain’s mentions on Twitter are full of people applauding his ingenuity, but also some who think it’s all a prank and that T-Pain owned the site all along. Either way, it’s a pretty good wheeze: T-Pain has some new merchandise to sell and he has gone far beyond his 1.2m Twitter followers with a campaign that’s a bit like the Mean Tweets segment on US chat show Jimmy Kimmel Live. But turned into a retail opportunity. As with Lewis Capaldi and James Blunt in the UK, if you can puncture the online abuse with humour or irony, it makes you look better and smarter than the trolls. And spinning some revenue out of this makes the victory even sweeter.