IT was news to arouse the indignation of many residents of Queens: Golden Dawn, the neo-Nazi group based in Athens, had established an office in Astoria — or so it seemed.

The evidence was elusive: late last month, a professional Web site suddenly appeared, showing the party’s swastikalike logo set against a dark Manhattan skyline and calling on the city’s Greek diaspora to donate food and clothing to a charity drive to benefit struggling poor people in Greece. There were pictures on the site: one was of a group of men with their backs turned to the camera, wearing black T-shirts reading, in Greek, “Golden Dawn New York.”

Although the site went down within days of its emergence — targeted, it was reported, by Anonymous, the hackers’ group — it provoked sufficient outrage that local politicians, doing what they do, rallied at a news conference to condemn the right-wing party, and a grass-roots protest movement sprang up in an effort to oppose it.

The problem was — and, indeed, still is — that almost nothing is known about the party’s actual presence in the neighborhood. Does Golden Dawn really have an office in Astoria, the center of the city’s Greek community? That is not clear. What are its goals? Also unclear. Is its membership significant or minimal? No one knows for sure.