It was late July, the height of summer in New York City. Clarabelle Rodriguez needed new glasses, but it was sweltering outside and she didn't want to tramp the steamy streets of Manhattan looking for a pair. So the Spanish-born speech therapist did what hundreds of thousands of Australians do each week. She pulled a chair up to her dining table, opened her laptop, clicked on Google, and typed the name of her favourite eyeglass brand into the search bar.

She quickly found the perfect frames, made by a French brand called Lafont, at DecorMyEyes.com. The company's website looked cool, and it stood at the top of the search results. Not the tippy-top, where the paid ads sit, but under those, on Google's version of the gold-medal podium, where the most relevant and popular site is displayed. Thrilled with her find, Rodriguez ordered the Lafonts and a set of doctor-prescribed Ciba Vision contact lenses. The total cost was $361.97.

As routine as the transaction looked, those few keystrokes heralded what Rodriguez would later describe as one of the most terrifying, maddening and miserable experiences of her life. It has changed the way the world's biggest search engine ranks its listings, and could see one man jailed for decades.

The day after Rodriguez placed her order, a man named Tony Russo called. DecorMyEyes had run out of the Ciba Visions, he brusquely told her. Pick another brand. "I told him I didn't want another brand," says Rodriguez, who lives in the fashionable Chelsea area of Manhattan. "And I asked for a refund. He got rude, really obnoxious. 'What's the big deal? Choose another brand!'"

The contacts issue was still unresolved when her glasses arrived two days later. As soon as she ripped open the package, Rodriguez, a lifelong fan of Lafont, sensed the frames were counterfeits. Even the case seemed fake. But things were about to get worse. DecorMyEyes had charged her $487 - an extra $125. When she and Russo spoke again, she asked about the overcharge and said she would return the frames.

"What the hell am I supposed to do with these glasses?" she recalls Russo shouting. "I ordered them from France specifically for you!"

"I am going to contact my credit card company," she informed him, "and dispute the charge."

Until then, Russo was merely cranky. Now he erupted. "Listen, bitch," he fumed, according to Rodriguez. "I know your address. I'm one bridge over" – a reference to the company's office in Brooklyn. Then, she said, he threatened to find her and commit an act of sexual violence too graphic to describe in a magazine.

She was shaken, but undaunted. That day she called Citibank, which administers her MasterCard account, and won a provisional victory. Her $487 would be refunded as the bank looked into the charge, but a final determination, Rodriguez was told, would take 60 days.

As that deadline approached, Russo dropped his claim for the contact lenses. But, she says, he stepped up his campaign to get her to drop the Citibank dispute. After threatening to take her to the small claims court, he emailed her details of a lawsuit. It included a hearing date and time, the address of the court, and a demand for $1500, which, "includes my legal fees". Rodriguez did not respond.

A few hours later, Russo sent another email, this one with a photograph of the front of her apartment building. Then her mobile started ringing. And ringing. Rodriguez and her fiancé went to the police at 1am to file a complaint. "At that point," she says, "I was scared."

An officer assured her the police would take the issue seriously. Two days later, she received another email. "Close the dispute with the credit card company if you know what's good for you," wrote Russo. "Do the right thing and everyone goes away. I AM WATCHING YOU!"

That same day an email from Citibank arrived. "Thank you for contacting Citi Cards," it read. "We have closed our investigation since you have indicated that you accept responsibility for this charge." Someone posing as Rodriguez, she says, called the bank and said she had changed her mind and no longer wanted a refund.

By then, Rodriguez had learnt more about DecorMyEyes. Over the past three years, dozens of people had contacted an advocacy website called Get Satisfaction with nearly identical tales about DecorMyEyes: a purchase gone wrong, followed by phone calls, emails and threats, sometimes lasting for months or years. Occasionally, the owner gave his name as Stanley Bolds, but the consensus at Get Satisfaction was he and Tony Russo were the same person. Others dug a little deeper and decided that both names were fictitious and the company was owned and run by a man named Vitaly Borker.

And the most outrageous Get Satisfaction post was written by Russo/Bolds/Borker himself. "Hello, my name is Stanley with DecorMyEyes.com," the post began. "I just wanted to let you guys know that the more replies you people post, the more business and the more hits and sales I get. My goal is NEGATIVE advertisement." It's all part of a sales strategy, he said. Online chatter about DecorMyEyes, even complaints, pushed the site higher in search results, which led to more sales. "I never had the amount of traffic I have now since my first complaint," he wrote. "I am in heaven."

Borker could be a pioneer of a new brand of anti-salesmanship - utterly noxious retail - that is fuelled by the shortcomings of internet commerce. Is it nice? Certainly not. Profitable? "Very," says Borker, during the first of several surprisingly unguarded conversations. "I've exploited this opportunity because it works. No matter where they post their negative comments, it helps my return on investment. So I decided, why not use that negativity to my advantage?"

But days after Rodriguez's plight was highlighted in The New York Times, a "horrified" Google issued a statement saying it had developed an algorithmic solution, "which detects [DecorMyEyes] along with hundreds of other merchants that, in our opinion, provide an extremely poor user experience...being bad is, and hopefully will always be, bad for business in Google's search results".

But Google is not the only enterprise that inadvertently enabled Borker. eBay did, too, before it bounced him from its site. Basically, DecorMyEyes doesn't stock the merchandise it sells; it simply takes orders, then buys from an assortment of merchandisers, including several on eBay. Then Borker instructs those sellers to send products to his customers. When sellers decline, for legitimate reasons, he has exacted revenge by leaving negative feedback, which can be reputation poison to an eBay business. "eBay allows you to block certain people from bidding on your merchandise, but when I did that he would just register under a different name," says one seller, who requested anonymity because, as he put it, "I hear the guy is dangerous."

Vitaly Borker lives in a large house in Brooklyn. Though he's easy to find - his address is posted on DecorMyEyes - a welcome mat at his front door holds a Russian phrase roughly translating to "go away". A young assistant with a Russian accent answers the door. She gets Borker, who emerges a minute later - a lean, 30ish man, about 190cm tall with light hair, a day's worth of stubble and wearing a T-shirt, tracksuit pants and a baseball cap turned backwards. Although it's noon, he rubs his head as if he's just woken up. "I slept in for the first time in a while," he says. "What do you want to know?"

He first heard about Get Satisfaction via an email from one of the site's employees, who was trying to mediate on behalf of unhappy customers. "They wrote to me, 'We'd like to talk to you; we should take a proactive approach,'" sneers Borker. "I sent him a photograph of this," he says, raising his middle finger.

In 2006, court documents show, he was sued by several luxury manufacturers, including Chanel, that accused him of peddling counterfeits. In one case, filed by Chloé and Mont Blanc, the plaintiffs won a $300,000 settlement against Borker and two other defendants. He stumbled upon the upside of being rude by accident. "I stopped caring," he says, and for that he blames customers. They lied and changed their minds in ways that cost him money, he says, and at some point he started telling them - in the bluntest of terms. To his amazement, this lifted his standing in certain Google searches. "Look," he says, grabbing an iPad off a table. He types "Christian Audigier," the name of a French designer, and "glasses" into Google. DecorMyEyes pops up high on the first page. "Why am I there?" he asks, sounding both amazed and peeved. "I don't belong there. I actually outrank the designer's own website."

He swears a vast majority of his transactions are amicable, and is adamant all of the customers he verbally attacks deserve it. "Psychos" is his favourite term for these unhappy shoppers, and when they grumble about reporting him to the Better Business Bureau - nearly 300 have done so in the past three years - he urges them to grumble to Get Satisfaction as well.

When fury about DecorMyEyes drops off, he dreams up new ways to stoke it. He considered fabricating a story that Tony Russo had committed a murder - where he would have posted this story he doesn't say - which he then planned to link anonymously to Get Satisfaction. Nah, he ultimately decided. Too far.

The only limit on his antics is imposed by Visa and MasterCard. If too many customers successfully dispute charges, he can be tossed from their networks, he says. "But there is no such thing as shutting someone down on the internet," he adds. "It isn't possible. If Visa and MasterCard shut me down, I'd use the name of a friend of mine. Give him one per cent."

Clarabelle Rodriguez is a petite woman with the lean build of a marathon runner. She was raised in Spain, but has lived in New York for a decade and works as a speech therapist. She is sitting in her apartment with her fiancé and their French bulldog, which has had surgery and is recuperating in a child’s red wagon. Rodriguez has a meticulous record of all things Russo. She reads some of his emails and plays several saved messages left by him on her phone. It is unmistakably Borker. "I'm stubborn," she says. "I wasn't going to let this guy push me around." She recalls the days surrounding the unhappy resolution of her Citibank dispute - her refund has since been restored - when her mobile would ring several times a night, often as late as 3am. The caller would just hang up, and if she didn't answer, no message was left.

Soon after, she posted a message on Get Satisfaction urging anyone who’d been scammed by DecorMyEyes to get in touch. She wanted to buttress her case against the firm by forwarding complaints of other consumers to the authorities. "You must be prepared to sign an affidavit if contacted by a detective," she wrote on the site. This angered Russo, and he let Rodriguez know it. She received an email from him that promised, in a vague but creepy way, that she would end up on the evening news. Another read, in part, "...you put your hand in fire. Now it's time to get burned." Those emails left her trembling. "I feared for my life," she says. "I was actually looking over my shoulder when I left my apartment because I had no idea what he was capable of. Psychologically, he had gotten to me." Back she went to the police. Again, they were empathetic, but, she says, they told her they were still trying to build a case.

That photo of her apartment building, he claims, was just an image he copied off Google Earth. He says he sent it only to underscore that when it came time to hire a process server to commence litigation, he'd find her. The "hand in fire" threat? Metaphorical, he says. Then again, he acknowledges with a sly grin, if Rodriguez thought Tony Russo seemed a little scary, that was fine. But in Borker's mind, he's the victim. "She's a psycho," he says, adding that she still has the glasses he sent her. (Untrue, refutes Rodriguez.)

So why not get another job? "I love this!" he exclaims, brightening. "I like the craziness. This works for me."

Asked by The New York Times to sit for a photograph, Borker declined. No, too many psychos out there, he explains. Besides, he doesn't need his face in the newspaper. What he needs is his company's name visible for all the world to see – and all the search engines to crawl – in the online version of the newspaper. Along with some keywords, "Just throw in 'designer eyeglasses', 'designer eyewear’ and a couple different brand names," he says, "and I'm all set."

Or, maybe not. On December 6, federal agents arrested Borker and charged him with one count each of mail fraud, wire fraud, making interstate threats and cyberstalking. The fraud charges alone carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. The stalking and threats charges carry a maximum of five years. Denying Borker’s request for bail, Magistrate Judge Michael H. Dolinger told the District Court in Lower Manhattan that the internet spruiker was "verging on psychotic" or had "an explosive personality".

Whichever is true, Borker has once again hit Google's giddy heights - just type in the keywords "fraud", "stalking", and "spectacular downfall".