Spam Revenge

Man gets "spam rage" over penis ad
By Adam Tanner

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Call it spam rage: A Silicon Valley computer programmer has been arrested for threatening to torture and kill employees of the company he blames for bombarding his computer with Web ads promising to enlarge his penis.

In one of the first prosecutions of its kind in the state that made "road rage" famous, Charles Booher, 44, was arrested on Thursday and released on bail for making repeated threats to staff of a Canadian company between May and July.

Booher threatened to send a "package full of Anthrax spores" to the company, to "disable" an employee with a bullet and torture him with a power drill and ice pick; and to hunt down and castrate the employees unless they removed him from their e-mail list, prosecutors said.

He used return e-mail addresses including Satan@hell.org.

In a telephone interview with Reuters on Friday, Booher acknowledged that he had behaved badly but said his computer had been rendered almost unusable for about two months by a barrage of pop-up advertising and e-mail.