Meet the spam Nazi

Spamming was apparently part of Hawke's career strategy even before he was laughed out of the American white-power movement.

In May 1999, as Hawke was redesigning the ANP Web site and retooling the party's platform, he also registered Knifed.com -- the future home of his first spam-vertised site, the American Knife Depot. Instead of his own name, Hawke listed his significant other and chief party secretary, Patricia Lingenfelter, as registrant, according to Internet records.

In early July, just weeks before a failed white-power march on Washington he helped organize, someone using the name Jon was spamming Internet message boards with bogus testimonials about Knifed.com's "totally reasonable" prices for knives and other weapons.

Ever since, to throw the feds and anti-spammers off his trail, Hawke has used fictitious names like Johnny Durango, James Kincaid, Winston Cross, Clell Miller, George Baldwan, or John Milton in the registration records for the dozens of Internet domains he has registered for his online storefronts over the years.

For his physical address, Hawke typically lists a Mail Boxes Etc. location in New Hampshire, New York, or Vermont. It's a technique he has used since 1998, when the Knights of Freedom site listed a Mail Boxes Etc. store in Walpole, Mass., as its address.

Rhode Island has apparently been Hawke's home for at least the past 18 months. Records kept by the American Registry for Internet Numbers show that in April 2002 someone using the name Dave Hawke registered a block of Internet protocol (IP) addresses on behalf of Quiksilver Enterprises, listing a Pawtucket, R.I., address. The IP addresses were later reported to have been used to send Quiksilver spam.

An online telephone directory maintained by AT&T shows a listing for "D Hawke" at the same address in Pawtucket. The cellphone number listed by "Dave Bridger" in numerous recent spams for Pinacle is on the Sprint PCS network in Providence, R.I., according to an online database.

When Hawke unleashes a load of spam touting Pinacle he forges the return address so no one can reply or easily track its source.

Using special spam software, he typically relays the e-mails through third-party mail servers to hide their true origin. Sometimes he uses an innocent bystander's e-mail addresses in the From line, so they have to deal with all the complaints, delivery-error or "bounce" messages, and list-remove requests.

These evasive tactics, all standard among spammers, are currently illegal in a handful of states. But no federal law yet exists to rein in such fraud. And while big Internet service providers such as AOL and MSN occasionally tie up large spammers with lawsuits, operations like Hawke's appear to be below the radar of the major ISPs.

This is not to say that business is easy for Hawke, who is now in his mid-twenties.

Opponents of junk e-mail have been playing a type of whack-a-mole game with Quiksilver and Amazing Internet since early 2000. Whenever Hawke sends a batch of spam touting a new Web site, the anti-spammers notify the Internet service provider that hosts the site. Often, those reports are in vain, since Hawke uses hosting companies in China, Russia, and South America for whom spamming is not a violation of acceptable use policies.

But anti-spammers have had some success in making Hawke's sites unreachable through another tactic. Because he typically uses bogus information in his domain registrations, Hawke is violating a requirement set by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers that so-called domain "whois" data be valid.

DirecNIC, Hawke's preferred domain registrar, has placed many of his domains on hold in response to reports that the registrations contain false information, according to Sigmund Solares, CEO of Intercosmos Media Group, the New Orleans firm that operates DirecNIC.

Hawke and his associates are also prone to mistakes, says Piers Forrest, a London-based salesman of high-end computers and a self-proclaimed anti-spammer. As they transfer files from one site to another in the process of staging a new storefront, the spammers often leave a log file behind on the source server. These file-transfer protocol (FTP) logs have enabled anti-spammers to learn about new Pinacle sites even before their operators announce them, thus providing a head start on the shutdown process.

Following a domain shutdown, Hawke quickly gathers himself and reappears at a new location on the Internet. But the technical interruptions can help tilt the economics of spamming, says Forrest.

"Spam is only profitable because the costs are so low. What a lot of us do is try to push up those costs by making sure that when a spammer is found that they lose their Internet connection and they are paying for a Web site that they lose, so that spamming is not worth it," says Forrest.

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