THE BBC IS reportedly “considering its options” over a website which impersonates its own news site – and which includes three less-than-savoury news stories.

It is not known how many visitors had been duped into visiting news-bbc.net, but the Guardian reports that the broadcaster is nonetheless pondering a legal challenge to have the site taken down.

The website – which is otherwise a carbon copy of the BBC News homepage from October 10, 2009 – carries three prominent and faked stories which did not feature on the original.

The most prominent of the three deals with an alleged admission from then-prime minister Gordon Brown that he had engaged in a three-year affair with former Conservative MP Ann Widdecombe.

Other stories allege that ITV presenter Phillip Schofield had been kidnapped by a gang seeking a £5m ransom, and that a man in York had been arrested after he was caught on CCTV having sex with a pumpkin.

All of the other stories that appear on the page are the stories that would have existed on the original BBC site – including references to Barack Obama’s Nobel Prize victory, an attack at a Pakistani army headquarters, and Marge Simpson’s appearance in Playboy.

The site claims to have been last updated in April 2010. Its domain name was registered on October 22, 2009, by a man from York.