A NEW English Scots for Yes website was hit by a "sophisticated hack" which wiped the entire database just hours before going live online, according to the co-founder of the relaunched group.

Inverclyde North SNP councillor Math Campbell-Sturgess, who is leading the campaign with his fiancee Angel Brammer, said the website's hosting company in the US is examining their logs to see if they can trace the hacker. Any information will be passed to Police Scotland.

English Scots for Yes, one of Scotland’s biggest Yes groups, announced their relaunch in The National this week in a bid to encourage thousands of English Scots to join the army of independence supporters in preparation for a second referendum.

Within hours of the relaunch the group had received a flood positive responses from English Scots keen to join up and share their stories about how welcome they feel in Scotland.

English Scots for Yes is hoping to reach out to potentially one million voters who were born in England but live in Scotland or Scots who have a connection to England as they gear up for a fresh drive, backed by the Yes2 Scotland campaign.

As part of that resurgence, Campbell-Sturgess planned to relaunch the website on Tuesday. However, when he attempted to enable the site he found that it had been completely wiped and he had to start from scratch to rebuild it.

He explained: "What happened was that I designed the website ready for the big push in the new year. It had been working fine up until I went online to turn the maintenance mode off and enable the site to relaunch it to find that that the database had been completely wiped.

"I have no idea who is responsible but I've got a very good hosting company and I got straight onto their phone support team in America. I was on the phone for about half an hour with them in the middle of the night trying to find out what had happened and to see if anything could be recovered.

"They described it as a sophisticated hack because it seems to have taken out the actual database which is the map to where everything is and left some of the files in place. It was completely wiped. The usual hacks just mess the files around or put a bit of bad code in place so it downloads links to various other websites.

"This wiped everything and also took out a couple of backups as well. I had to rebuild it in the middle of the night using most of the back up I had stored on my own computer. It is back up and running and people can go on to the website and sign up, there is also a shop and gallery on there.

"We might report it to the police. The hosting company is going to audit the logs to see what happened and if we can get evidence of illegality we will send to Police Scotland."

The new website is now up and running for members to join and find out more about the organisation at www.englishscotsforyes.org