People Doing Stupid Things: Spammer Makes Death Threat to Investigator   - 4,125 Views, 4 Comments

There are all kinds of people doing stupid things all the time. But some take the cake. Such as making a death threat against an officer who is investigating you. You have to admit, as people doing stupid things go, that’s pretty darned stupid.

But, of course, when I explain that it was a spammer who made the death threat, well, it begins to make more sense. Because we all know that most - not all, but most - spammers are even more stupid than the average stupid person.

In this instance, the death treat came from Peter Francis-Macrae, alleged to be the biggest spammer in the United Kingdom, but it’s actually not at all uncommon for spammers to make death threats, and other threats of bodily harm, to those whom they see as interfering with their operations.

When I worked at MAPS, one of the first anti-spam organizations around, our investigators routinely were threatened like this, both in email and on the telephone. In fact, folks arrived at the office one day only to find that someone’s windshield had been shot out.

But back to Macrae. Macrae was involved in a scam through which he spammed offers for cheap domain registrations in the EU. The only thing was, the domains he was advertising, and for which he was collecting money, weren’t available for sale. So he was investigated by the agency which deals with trading standards, and, it is said, he threatened to slit the throat of the trading standards officer.

Not the sharpest tool in the shed, eh what?

But a high-flying one, in more ways than one. With the 1.5million British pounds that he netted from his email scams he bought himself, among other things, designer clothing (Yves Saint Laurent) and helicopter lessons. You’d think that his father, with whom the 23-year-old Macrae still lived (in fact, his center of operations was his bedroom in his father’s house), might have caught on that his son had a bit too much spare cash for the average 23-year-old.

Said the attorney for the government, Rupert Mayo, “He resorted to using violent verbal abuse and deadly threats to quite innocent people when challenged about his fraudulent activity.”

Is anyone surprised?