Our website http://llidesign.co.uk (design and developed in house and completely hand coded, no templates) has been cloned at http://menplus.vn and is now being hosted on a .vn (Vietnam) domain.
What's the correct course of action to be taken to get them to take this down, ASAP?
The site in question is not a 100% clone since some pages have been altered, it looks like the site is being worked on and the copyrighted images may be removed once they have the site finished but with this said its still possible to claim ownership of the design.
Your first action should be identifying who owns the domain, me being bored I've decided to do that for you. Standard domain whois services will not work on .vn domains and you need to go to the authority .vn regulator which in this case is VNNIC. The public records for the domain owner in question is:
This is some what different than what they claim on the website but here's the contact information using the data on their website:
Now you have this information there is so many routes you can take, personally you should seek professional legal advice and have lawyers send out letters to the addresses in question, and where they go from there is depends on the response, if any.
Alternatively you could try first contact yourself as well as seeking help from Google, you can send a email to info@true-x.net with a take down notice threatening legal action. Also it may be possible to remove their site from search results on Google using a DMCA take down. It's important to note that not all copyrights apply in all countries and vary, this is another reason why you should seek legal advice.
You will need to sue them for copyright infringement ... in Vietnam (unless they have operations in other countries which you can go after).
You can of course send them a letter via your lawyers demanding they take it down and/or ask for compensation, but that is likely to be ignored unless this is actually a legit company that unknowingly bought the website from a less scrupulous person/company.
In any case, you'll need to consult a lawyer if you wish to press this issue.
Try contacting his website registrar https://powernet.vn/. My guess is you will have the best luck emailing sales@powernet.vn as they seem to require a purchase to contact them in any other way. They will probably take it down as they have very little to gain from not doing so. By the way, don't bother with minification or obscuration, they are ridiculously easy to get around.
