Threats To Ddos Is it a criminal offence?

[FirefoxRocks 0]

In an IRC chatroom/channel, is saying that you may do a DDoS a chargeable offense? I know that the user was joking because he could do no such thing on the IRC server, but he got banned an received a scary message from an op/moderator telling him that they could trace his IP address down to his doorbell. It is really scaring him.Now I was wondering if this would fall under uttering threats or what because it was only 1 time occurrence and that he didn't actually do anything harmful. Also, the ban message he got from the op was much more worse than what he said in the chatroom.I was just wondering about this, but this would majorly scare me and users in that channel if it WAS a chargeable offense. I couldn't find anything on this and it seemed like a good topic to investigate. Wikipedia says that it is against the Internet Ethics defined in the RFC protocol but other than that no other info was available. I know that actually launching a DDoS attack would be a chargeable offense because of the damage but this...I don't know?