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The parody site, which has been around since late 1999, in the past week copied the WTO's site design and began harvesting the e-mail addresses of visitors without their permission, WTO spokesman Jean-Guy Carrier said in a telephone interview. The stunt could enable the hoaxers to send visitors information purporting to be from the WTO, he said.

Until mid-afternoon today, the phony site, at www.gatt.org (a reference to the WTO's predecessor, the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs), mimicked almost every detail of the official WTO site, at www.wto.org, down to the front-page warning about a fake site masquerading as the real thing. The hoaxers have subverted the notice to warn visitors of the imagined dangers of a third site, www.wto-ministerial.org, set up by the WTO to promote an upcoming conference.

The fake WTO site changed its look this afternoon so that it no longer exactly resembles the real WTO Web site.

Even so, the phony site contains so many references to the WTO that some search engines are directing people to it instead of to the official site. A search of AltaVista using the keyword WTO returns www.gatt.org in fifth place.

The hoaxers made small alterations to text on their copy of the site. "Secretary General Mike Moore" in the original text of a press release becomes "Chief Executive Officer Mike Moore" on the fake site, and "a draft Ministerial Declaration on intellectual property and access to medicines/public health" is transformed at www.gatt.org into "a draft Ministerial Declaration on Intello-Corporate Ownership and access to medicines/consumer work-fitness."

While the WTO encourages criticism of its role, there are limits to the forms this should take, said Carrier.

"It's a serious argument to make for or against the WTO, and we encourage that," he said, but "not masquerading as the WTO. It's very deceptive. It literally steals the look of the WTO."

The WTO is powerless to stop the hoax until a new procedure for domain name arbitration is introduced by the World Intellectual Property Organization allowing it to take control of the domain gatt.org, Carrier said.

One option would be to sue the creators of the parody site for theft of the WTO's graphical identity, but "we are not in the business of suing people," he said. "First of all, its very expensive, it takes a lot of time, and we are not that kind of organization. It's not a course that interests the WTO at all."

The domain name gatt.org is registered to Jonathan Prince of Washington, operator of the Web site Killyourtv.com, but another group calling itself The Yes Men claim responsibility for the WTO parody. On their Web site, www.theyesmen.org, the group claims that the parody has resulted in its members being invited to speak at a conference on the WTO's behalf.

A request for comment made via e-mail by the IDG News Service to a Yes Men e-mail address found on the group's site yielded an e-mail response from someone claiming to be a group representative. "We are not harvesting e-mail addresses -- it's just not so easy, if you're dumb like us, to write a search script, see? We don't know how they do it, so we can't rip that off. It's easier to just put a mailto: in there."

The representative, signing himself Andrew Bichlbaum, wrote that e-mail messages sent to searchdesire@gatt.org by the search form would receive an automated reply.

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• Online vote bidding declared a Web hoax, Nov. 13, 2000

• E-mail hoax panics Canadian credit-card customers, June 9, 2000