Here at toggle we’re always delighted to hear that we may have inspired someone. It always gives us a huge buzz…

But what do you do when you find the copy that you spent weeks writing and rewriting for your new company website has just been lifted by another design company?

Bizarrely, this is exactly what happened to us a couple of weeks ago.

An email from an online friend suggested we check out a company called Relik Creative in Columbus, Ohio, because the copy seemed a bit, well, similar…

It wasn’t similar, it was identical. The main body of copy from our newly launched toggle website had been lifted wholesale. The copy we must have re-written at least a hundred times, the copy we had debated and polished for hours was working hard for another design company.

Obviously, we were not happy campers. So we calmed down a bit and contacted Relik Creative’s owner, Alex Boorman, and politely asked him “WTF?”

To be fair, he immediately took the copy down from his site (but then again, he was pretty much bang to rights…) Alex said that he’d hired a virtual assistant to write it and his lawyers would be taking it up with them immediately. He said he was as angry as we were and at the time we had no reason not to believe him…

But the weeks have rolled by and Alex won’t give us the Virtual Assistant’s name, or the details of his lawyers who insist that he can’t pass it on.

It also seems strange that a company which offers a copy-writing service would hire a VA to bang out what most independent creatives would consider to be the single most important piece of copy they’ll ever write.

And the trouble with the internet is that while our copy is gone from the Relik Creative site, happy clients who thought it was great have pasted it on their site as a tribute to Relik’s creative genius.

Alex Boorman has stopped returning our emails, claiming he’s far too busy with clients to deal with this issue.

We think we’ve been really patient with Alex and have done all we can to try and make sense of it. If you’re a US newspaper or TV journalist who’s beat includes Columbus, Ohio, you might want to pick up the story. We’d be happy to pass on all the emails and screenshots.

Alex, we gave you the benefit of the doubt for as long as we could, but we think you’re guilty. Guilty of online theft and – maybe worst of all – guilty of trying to use the “a big boy did it and ran away” defence in the 21st Century…