A 23-year-old man branded the UK's worst spammer has been jailed for six years for a string of offences including blackmail and threatening to kill.

Peter Francis-Macrae, of St Neots, Cambridgeshire, was also found guilty of orchestrating a £1.6m European domain name scam even though he had no right to flog .eu domains.

And when the authorities began closing in, Francis-Macrae turned nasty, threatening to slit the throats of trading standards officers investigating his scams.

He also told a police switchboard operator, who'd recently been diagnosed with cancer, that he hoped she caught the disease.

Operating from a bedroom in his father's home Francis-Macrae made a fortune using spam to tout his domain registration scams. Not only did he sell unavailable .eu domains, he also sent out fake re-registration letters to UK domain owners. And although his various bank accounts have been frozen he refused to tell the court where he was hiding £425,000 saying police would steal the loot.

Sentencing Francis-Macrae yesterday Judge Nicholas Coleman described him as "one of the most vindictive young men [he'd] ever seen". ®