The brains buzzing behind a Barnet Football Club website are this week claiming foul play after a deliberately bogus story was picked up by rival sites.

The fans at www.netbees.co.uk had long suspected their stories were being 'borrowed' word for word by other football sites so they decided to conjure up a cunning ,, and completely untrue ,, player transfer.

'Some sites just take stuff off other websites and they have floated on the stock exchange and everything so they are making money out of us,' explained netbees guru Michael Edwards.

'We have e-mailed them several times asking them to stop but we were basically told it was tough.'

So Michael and his partners in creativity decided to seek revenge.

Netbees regulars may have been surprised to hear last week that the little-known 'John Cosgrove' was heading for Underhill on a free transfer from Watford. In reality he is the man behind the Bees fanzine but in the world of the web the fictitious Cosgrove soon became an ex-Watford, now Barnet, striker.

It was a matter of hours before the news travelled to TEAMtalk.com ,, a website covering all the latest news from the football and rugby worlds.

From there the football fiction spread further to the hallowed cyber corridors of soccerbase.com ,, a website priding itself on having the most up-to-the minute database of football players.

'We are seeking legal advice about other sites because they take things verbatim from us,' said Michael who has since received an apology from Soccerbase.com

'We were concerned that sites of that stature did not check their data. All Bees fans would have known straightaway that the story was false.'

Ian Holding, sport director at TEAMtalk, based in Leeds, said the netbees' antics were not honourable. 'It wasn't funny and it wasn't clever. We are referred to club websites by the clubs for news. There should be honour among journalists.

'We suffer from maybe ten or 20 incidences of plagiarism a week ,, a lot of people take our information. It's a real problem for us.'