Chinese web pirates steal design

Even details of company employees were copied by the pirates

A Scottish translation company has had its website design pirated by a company in China.

Lingo24, based in Edinburgh, were alerted to the rip-off by a firm called Universecy when a Google alert threw up a reference hidden in code.

The Universecy site uses almost identical wording, pictures and links and even has references to staff members and Lingo24's Aberdonian roots.

Lingo24 said taking court action would be difficult and expensive.

Christian Arno, founder and managing director, said: "The websites are virtually identical. Almost every page has been copied.

"Anyone familiar with the Lingo24 site would be fooled into thinking it was ours.

"It was the fact that they left the phrase Lingo24 in a meta-tag on one of the pages that notified us of its existence - via a Google Alert for our company name."

He said they would be informing Google to ensure the pirated site did not pose a threat to business.

"But apart from taking legal action in China, which is difficult and expensive, and complaining to their ISP or hosting company, there's very little we can do," he added.