Manga fans have fond memories of Go! Comi, a manga publisher that produced some interesting and high-quality series during its brief lifetime: You Higuri's Cantarella, the story of the cursed, but incredibly hot, Borgia family; After School Nightmare, a gender-bender tale that was nominated for an Eisner Award; and the beautifully drawn, sensitively written Song of the Hanging Sky. They also published entertaining trash like Train + Train that was simply fun to read. We liked Go! Comi.

Did we like them enough that we would donate money to help them get started again? As Kevin noted earlier, some enterprising scammer apparently thinks so: The Go! Comi web domain expired last year, and it looks like someone has picked it up and launched a fake Go! Comi website, complete with an appeal for donations so they can relaunch. Former Go! Comi exec Audry Taylor learned of this yesterday and immediately Tweeted

WARNING: MY FORMER GOCOMI.COM WEBSITE HAS BEEN TURNED INTO A SCAM. IT IS NOT REAL. DO NOT DONATE. GONNA SICK MY LAWYERS ON THEM. PLEASE RT.

And later on, she added, "Pretty sure that scam site is going to warrant criminal charges b/c it abuses the good name of a company, even if it's a defunct one."

The site, which is still up as of this writing, consists mostly of cover images and blocks of text copied from the old site. You can tell what the new guys have added because the writing goes from polished to this:

Go! Comi is coming back! We take great efforts to rebuilt Go! Comi as a publisher for Manga & Comics.

Help us rebuilding Go! Comi.

Other clues: Tacky Google text ads in the middle of the page and a blogroll that includes sites like carinsurancequotequote.info and loansbadcreditloans.info rather than, say, manga sites. Plus the design is pure generic. The original Go! Comi site, like everything they did, was classy and well designed; this is an eyesore.

Anime News Network reports that the domain is registered to an Austrian address and the PayPal account seems to be in Germany, but they warn that those could be spoofed as well.