AOL searches for spammer's buried treasure

gallery

AOL has applied to search the home of a spammer's parents in an attempt to find millions of dollars it won in a case against a spammer.

The company has applied for permission to search a two acre farm belonging to the parents of Davis Wolfgang Hawke, a spammer convicted last year. He owes $12.8 million to AOL but failed to appear in court and is now on the run.

AOL say that they have evidence that Hawke converted the profits from his spamming operation, thought to have been as high as $600,000 a month, into gold and platinum bars. The company believes these bars have been buried on the farm.

"We believe that it could be as much as half a million dollars or more in gold," AOL spokesman Nicholas Graham told CNN.

"We have receipts that have been submitted to the court indicating he purchased platinum and gold bars."

"This is not new. We've seized cars before, cash, gold coins and other assets including a boat, and even worked with the Virginia attorney general to put a lien on several houses."

Hawke, who also operates under a variety of names and is actually called Andy Greenbaum, is thought to have made millions by spamming emails advertising penis enlargement pills. However he kept few hard assets that AOL could use to pay off his debts.

The Southern Poverty Law Centre also has a file on Hawke. It says he came to their attention in the 1990s when he started a white supremacist movement and announced to the media that "I plan to make the Final Solution a reality."

But when it emerged that Hawke was Jewish the movement failed and he appears to have moved into spamming to make money.

Email to a friend

Print this page