A YOUNG computer expert threatened to cut the throats of police and trading standards staff as they investigated internet scams that earned him more than £1.5 million, a jury was told yesterday.

Peter Francis-Macrae, 23, spent a fortune on designer clothes and learning to fly helicopters after allegedly tricking thousands of innocent victims in e-mail and website frauds run from the bedroom of his father’s terraced house.

At one point, he allegedly threatened to attack the economy at a cost to business of millions of pounds an hour by programming robot computers to crash Britain’s internet system.

Mr Francis-Macrae, a slight figure in a tight grey T-shirt, sat in the dock looking down at a heavy file of evidence as tape recordings of what the prosecution said were his menacing phone calls were played aloud to Peterborough Crown Court. The voice, sneering and high-pitched, rang through the courtroom.

He had told one police switchboard operator that he hoped she died of cancer, which was particularly distressing, the jury was told, since she had had the disease diagnosed.

Mr Francis-Macrae denies making threats to kill against two women and a man, threatening to destroy or damage property by claiming he would burn down Cambridgeshire trading standards department, blackmail, fraudulent trading and transferring criminal property or “money laundering”.

The indictments date back to when he was 18. Rupert Mayo, for the prosecution, acclaimed Mr Francis-Macrae as a computer genius. “Unfortunately, he misused his talents to get very rich over the space of less than five years.”

Although his business was run from a bedroom, his website had included pictures of Canary Wharf, East London, with the invitation to “take a tour of our state-of-the-art” data centre. “A far cry,” Mr Mayo suggested, “from a terrace house in St Neots.”

He said that the defendant ran two scams based on the system of internet “domain names”, the individual addresses that every user needs to run a website or receive e-mails, usually with a suffix such as .com or .co.uk.

First, he sent unsolicited “spam” e-mails to thousands of people around the world offering to register them for new “.eu” European domain names. The money rolled in at the rate of £200,000 a fortnight, people thinking that he was a genuine registrar, the court was told.

One customer paid £5,780 to register a long list of addresses. The defendant accepted payment for offensive names such as f***theeu although they would never be allowed, it was alleged. The other trick involved posting letters to people whose domain names were due to expire, demanding a renewal fee under threat of service being withdrawn. This brought in nearly £600,000.

His entire bogus earnings were calculated at £1.6 million. “It was as if Mr Francis-Macrae had found the goose that laid golden eggs,” Mr Mayo said.

Police and trading standards began investigations, threatening a lifestyle that had brought the defendant £12,000 of Yves Saint Laurent clothing and £16,000 in helicopter lessons. “He resorted to using violent verbal abuse and deadly threats to quite innocent people when challenged about his fraudulent activity,” Mr Mayo said.

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