A CRAZY internet entrepreneur threatened complaining customers with rape and murder so his name would appear more often on search engines, he told the court.Vitaly Borker, 34, ran DecorMyEyes.com, selling glasses and sunglasses, from his home in Brooklyn, NY.
But if anyone complained, he sent vicious threats, e-mailing one client a picture of their home and telling another's workplace their staff member was a gay drug dealer.
He also sent warnings such as ‘I know where you live," to others.
Borker, 34, came up with novel excuse that dozens of complaints by frightened customers helped elevate his website’s position on Google searches. It actually prompted the huge search engine to look at the issue
and change its search algorithm so no company could positively use negative feedback.
A Google spokesman said: "We can say with reasonable confidence that being bad to customers is bad for business on Google."
Borker, who was arrested last December by postal inspectors, used aliases to threaten death or sexual assault on customers.
He told the Manhattan Federal District Court: "I was answering personally about 100 e-mails a day and lost control of what I was saying at times.
"I want to apologise to everyone I hurt in connection with my actions, especially those people I threatened."
"I never had an intention to harm anyone and I never did anything to carry out these threats. At the time I did this I did not realise how bad it was."
He pleaded guilty on Thursday to two counts of sending threatening communications, one count of mail fraud and one count of wire fraud.
He is facing more than six years in jail and sentencing is set for September. But Dominic Amorosa, defending, said he expected a top sentence of 18 months.
