In the early years of the commercial Internet, spam was more than an annoyance. It became an industry.

Millions of unsolicited emails poured into inboxes advertising everything imaginable. Internet providers built increasingly sophisticated filters to stop them, lawmakers tried to regulate them, and companies began taking the people responsible to court.

One of the strangest battles involved AOL and a man named Davis Wolfgang Hawke.

It would eventually involve millions of unwanted emails, a $12.8 million court judgment, a missing defendant, rumors of buried gold and platinum, multiple identities—and, more than a decade later, a burned vehicle on a logging road in British Columbia.

When Spam Was Big Business

Davis Wolfgang Hawke was born Andrew Britt Greenbaum in 1978 and later legally changed his name. By the early 2000s, he had become involved in the rapidly growing business of bulk commercial email.

In March 2004, AOL sued Hawke and others as part of a coordinated legal offensive by AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo and EarthLink against large-scale spammers. AOL alleged that Hawke and his associates had transmitted millions of unwanted emails directing customers to websites selling products that included weight-loss supplements, male-enhancement pills, personal lie detectors and other merchandise.

The scale of the spam problem at the time is difficult to appreciate today. AOL reported that its filters had been blocking approximately 2.3 billion spam messages a day in November 2003. By 2005, that number had fallen to about 1.4 billion a day, a decline the company attributed partly to improved filtering and aggressive litigation.

Hawke did not appear to defend himself in AOL's lawsuit.

In 2005, a federal court in Virginia entered a default judgment against him and others totaling approximately $12.8 million.

AOL had won.

Collecting the money was another matter.

You've Got Gold

Hawke had disappeared.

AOL couldn't simply seize a house or an investment account because the assets it was looking for weren't readily available. But the company believed something far more unusual had happened to at least some of Hawke's money.

It believed he had converted it into gold and platinum.

AOL had obtained records of substantial precious-metal purchases associated with Hawke. His mother also told reporters that her son had spoken about buying gold rather than expensive houses or automobiles because gold would be more difficult for litigants to seize.

Then came the extraordinary part.

AOL believed some of that precious metal might be buried.

In 2006, the company sought access to property belonging to Hawke's family in Massachusetts. Contemporary reports described plans to use radar and sonar to search for hidden gold and platinum. Hawke's family disputed the idea that treasure was buried on the property, and his mother reportedly believed that if he had buried anything, it was more likely somewhere in New Hampshire's White Mountains.

Think about the scene for a moment.

One of the world's best-known Internet companies had gone to federal court and won a multimillion-dollar judgment against an email spammer.

Now it was contemplating a treasure hunt.

That strange episode illustrates something about the Internet that remains relevant twenty years later.

A court can determine that someone owes money.

Finding the person and the money can be much harder.

A Digital Business With a Physical Problem

The Internet changed geography.

Someone could reach millions of people without owning stores, printing catalogs or maintaining a conventional distribution network. Money could be generated through activities conducted almost entirely through computers and telecommunications networks.

But eventually the consequences had to arrive somewhere in the physical world.

AOL's problem wasn't really technological anymore. It had identified the activity, pursued the people it believed responsible and obtained a judgment.

The problem was enforcement.

Where was Hawke?

Where was the money?

And what exactly can you seize when someone has deliberately structured his affairs to make assets difficult to find?

Those questions sound surprisingly contemporary.

Today the technologies are different. We talk about cryptocurrency, ransomware, online fraud, offshore operations and digital identities rather than the spam empires of the early 2000s.

But the underlying problem remains remarkably familiar:

The Internet makes it extraordinarily easy to operate across boundaries. Accountability still has to catch up in the physical world.

Hawke's story, however, became stranger still.

Jesse James

Years passed.

On June 14, 2017, Canadian authorities discovered a man's body inside a burned GMC Yukon on a forest road north of Squamish, British Columbia.

He had been shot.

The man was known locally as Jesse James and was reportedly an avid rock climber. Authorities initially did not know his true identity.

For approximately three years, the victim remained unidentified.

Then, in October 2020, Canadian investigators announced that they had conclusively established who he was.

Jesse James was Davis Wolfgang Hawke.

The Internet spammer AOL had pursued more than a decade earlier had apparently been living in Canada under another name.

His identification answered one mystery and created another. Investigators said at the time that learning Hawke's identity opened new avenues of investigation, particularly concerning the motive for his killing.

It was an extraordinary ending to an already extraordinary story.

The Internet Changes. Human Behavior Doesn't.

It is easy to look back at the spam wars of the early 2000s as Internet archaeology.

AOL itself belongs to a very different technological era. Dial-up modems have largely disappeared. Email filtering is vastly better. The business models and technologies used for online abuse have evolved.

But Hawke's story doesn't really feel obsolete.

Technology continually creates new ways to communicate, transact and move value. Inevitably, someone discovers how to exploit those systems faster than institutions learn how to police them.

Then technology changes again.

Spam gives way to phishing. Anonymous websites give way to social-media scams. Money moves from conventional accounts into new forms of digital assets. Criminals and regulators continually adapt to one another.

The tools change much faster than the underlying behavior.

And that may be the most interesting thing about the strange battle between AOL and Davis Wolfgang Hawke.

AOL ultimately faced a problem that no spam filter could solve.

It could block the email.

It could identify the alleged sender.

It could go to court.

It could even win $12.8 million.

But eventually someone still had to answer two remarkably old-fashioned questions:

Where is the man?

And where did he put the money?