BRITAIN’S most prolific internet spammer, known to his victims as “Weaselboy”, was jailed yesterday for threatening to kill women working for trading standards and the police as they closed in on his £1.6 million internet scam.

Peter Francis-Macrae, 23, gulped nervously in the dock as a jury returned unanimous verdicts that he was a fraudster, money launderer and blackmailer whose victims believed that he would take their lives and destroy their workplaces.

A judge imprisoned him for six years, accusing him of a “catalogue of criminality” that made him a danger to the community at large, to authority and to the internet.

Francis-Macrae used spam to trick victims to pay him to register for new European Internet addresses ending in “.eu”. The scam earned him £200,000 a fortnight.

One woman lost £10,000. When trading standards and police began investigating 2,000 complaints about his frauds, he repeatedly telephoned their switchboards and threatened to cut staff’s throats.

“You are one of the most vindictive young men I have ever seen,” Judge Nicholas Coleman told the defendant at Peterborough Crown Court.

Cambridgeshire police said that this case proved that internet fraudsters could never hide behind their computers.

Francis-Macrae was arrested minutes before he could carry out a threat to crash Britain’s internet system using his army of 200,000 zombie computers.

He conned thousands of victims all over the world from a business created using a home computer in a bedroom at his father’s Victorian terraced house in St Neots, Cambridgeshire.

The money was spent indulging his passion for helicopters by taking lessons and getting a flying licence. He bought himself £12,000 worth of Yves Saint Laurent designer clothes.

The police are trying to find and confiscate nearly £500,000 that Francis-Macrae withdrew from a building society. He said in the witness box that he had access to the money but refused to give its location.

Francis-Macrae was convicted of making threats to kill two women, threatening to damage or destroy property by claiming that he would burn down Cambridgeshire trading standards department, blackmail, fraudulent trading and money laundering. He was cleared of two other charges of threatening to kill. The jury took a day and a half to reach unanimous verdicts after a month- long trail that was technically complex.

Francis-Macrae has spent nearly a year remanded in custody at jail in Peterborough after breaking bail conditions.

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