Web Businessman Sentenced for Threats

By David Segal 

A Brooklyn man who terrified customers of his online eyewear store with threats of violence, including rape, was sentenced on Thursday to four years in federal prison and ordered to pay nearly $100,000 in restitution and fines.

Vitaly Borker was arrested in December 2010 at his home in Brooklyn.

Vitaly Borker, 36, who owned and operated DecorMyEyes from his home in Sheepshead Bay, pleaded guilty in May 2011 to charges of fraud and sending threatening communications. He admitted that he had scared dissatisfied customers with phone calls and e-mails, in some cases vowing rape, murder or dismemberment, according to prosecutors.

Mr. Borker was the subject of a November 2010 article in The New York Times in which he claimed that frightening consumers was a way to generate Internet publicity about his business, which purportedly elevated his profile in Google searches, generating more traffic and revenue. His theory was that any kind of online chatter lifted DecorMyEyes in Google’s rankings.

A few days after the article was published, Google announced on its blog that the company was “horrified” by Mr. Borker’s strategy and in response had already tinkered with its algorithm so that “being bad is, and hopefully will always be, bad for business in Google’s search results.”

Postal inspectors arrested Mr. Borker the next week.

Though he pleaded guilty, Mr. Borker’s case went on for more than 18 contentious months, punctuated by a number of hearings. The latest, in July, centered on whether Mr. Borker had uttered the worst of the statements in the government’s indictment, something he denied.

A handful of Mr. Borker’s victims were summoned to testify about calls and e-mails they had received, which turned out to include a threat to slice off the legs of one customer. Federal District Judge Richard J. Sullivan said, at the end of one day of testimony, that he found the victims credible and so disturbing that he revoked Mr. Borker’s bail, which had allowed him to live at home under restrictions.

In court on Thursday afternoon, Mr. Borker, who is roughly 6 feet 5 inches tall, was dressed in a jail-issued dark blue suit and looked heavier and grayer than he did in late 2010. Given the opportunity to speak, he rose and tearfully read from a statement.

“As I stand here before you today, I am genuinely and deeply sorry for the threats that I made,” he said. “To say that I am ashamed of myself is an understatement.” He added that his father had died after his arrest and lived his last days with the shame of his son’s crimes.

“I had a big mouth and I couldn’t control it,” he continued. Through sobs, he closed by saying he would never commit another crime and prayed for the opportunity to return to his family.

Before that, his lawyer, Dominic F. Amorosa, argued that Mr. Borker deserved leniency because he is mentally ill — a doctor hired by the defense said he has “a bipolar mood disorder characterized by impulsive and manic mood symptoms” — and was frequently under the influence of marijuana and alcohol.

Mr. Amorosa also contended that only a tiny fraction of Mr. Borker’s customers were threatened and that his business was otherwise a thriving enterprise. DecorMyEyes had thousands of repeat customers, he said, and millions of dollars in revenue.

“He threatened, horribly, 25 people,” Mr. Amorosa said, suggesting that was a small number, given the scale of the company.

Judge Sullivan was unmoved. He said that he knew from testimonials of family and friends that there was some decency in Mr. Borker. But even if he threatened only 25 people, those were 25 people who sincerely feared for their lives. In some cases, they contacted the police or installed security systems.

“The fact is, these were vile threats,” he told Mr. Borker. “You were terrorizing people.”

As Judge Sullivan was describing some of these threats, Mr. Borker started shaking his head, as if to say, “I never did such things.” The judge noted the head shaking and added that this proved that he still had not grasped the gravity of his action.

In addition to four years in prison, Mr. Borker was told he would be on probation for three years after his release, during which he will not be allowed to use a computer. He was also told to receive psychiatric and substance-abuse counseling.

As Mr. Borker left the courtroom, he turned to his wife, and looking surprisingly serene, gave her the “I’ll call you” gesture with one hand.

The four-year sentence was on the low side of the guidelines, which Judge Sullivan described as a range of 46 to 57 months. But the United States attorney, Preet Bharara, said that sentence would serve as a deterrent.

“Vitaly Borker was an Internet shopper’s worst nightmare,” Mr. Bharara said in a statement released Thursday afternoon. “Borker operated behind the veil of the Internet and aliases to first defraud his victims and then, if they complained, terrorize them with threats, intimidation and harassment.”