Post by Silveira on Nov 24, 2003 17:00:23 GMT -5
from www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/07/29/spam_nazi/
www.splcenter.org/images/imglib/I/ir111_hawke_200x150.jpg
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What does a former white-power activist do after being drummed out of the movement? He turns to peddling thingy-enlargement pills.
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By Brian McWilliams
July 29, 2003 | Dave Bridger answers his cellphone with a simple "Yo." It comes across as feigned mafia-like toughness. But you can hardly blame him for being edgy whenever the phone rings.
In recent weeks, Bridger has published his cellphone number in thousands of junk e-mails sent all over the world. The spams invite other "real bulkers" to join him in peddling a thingy-enlargement pill called Pinacle.
"Everybody wants a bigger thingy, so this product pulls a massive amount of sales ... All you do is MAIL, MAIL, MAIL. And collect your commission check," claim Bridger's invitations.
For more than three years, Bridger has deftly balanced the most difficult task of a spammer (or "bulk mailer," to use the term he prefers): giving out enough contact information to make a sale without putting the whole operation at risk.
For Bridger, keeping a grip on his own identity may be another challenge. When he's tired or distracted and the cellphone chirps to life, Bridger might even have to pause and ask himself: What is my name today?
Legally, the man who goes by the name Bridger appears to be Davis Wolfgang Hawke, a former white-power activist who renounced his birth name, Andrew Britt Greenbaum, in 1996 at the age of 18. But in the late '90s Hawke also went by the moniker Bo Decker. At the time, he was head of the Knights of Freedom Nationalist Party, one of the fastest growing neo-Nazi groups in the United States, which he later renamed the American Nationalist Party while a student at Wofford College in South Carolina.
But he hasn't really used the names Decker or Hawke online for years. Those identities imploded in 1999, shortly after word got out that his father was a Jew from the Boston suburbs, and people started calling him a "kosher Nazi." The ANP and its leader crawled quietly under a rock.
Yet as his world was crumbling around him, Hawke vowed he'd make a comeback on the political scene. In an interview with Rolling Stone in late 1999, Hawke predicted he would run for "major public office" within a decade. But first, he would need "a lot of money to back me up."
So what does a former American Nationalist Party member do to make some quick bucks? In Hawke's case, he turned to thingy-enlargement pills -- and a host of other dodgy products, including human growth hormone, free government grants, inkjet-printer refills, extended car warranties, "eBay secrets" -- marketed via spam e-mail campaigns. Today, Hawke's spam operations -- Quiksilver Enterprises and Amazing Internet Products -- while nowhere near the biggest sources of junk e-mail on the Internet, may be among its more profitable spam-based enterprises.
The life of a spammer is not a dull one. Hawke must move quickly through the obscure back roads of the Net, abandoning the Internet domains that he uses to generate his spam in quick order after he is discovered by anti-spam vigilantes or other spam fighters. The trail he leaves behind him offers a bizarre look at the seedy world of spam entrepreneurship. White-power organizer turned thingy-pill spammer, he sounds like a fictional character in a bad comic novel. But he's quite real.
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.
www.splcenter.org/images/imglib/I/ir111_hawke_200x150.jpg
[/img]
Meet the spam Nazi
What does a former white-power activist do after being drummed out of the movement? He turns to peddling thingy-enlargement pills.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Brian McWilliams
July 29, 2003 | Dave Bridger answers his cellphone with a simple "Yo." It comes across as feigned mafia-like toughness. But you can hardly blame him for being edgy whenever the phone rings.
In recent weeks, Bridger has published his cellphone number in thousands of junk e-mails sent all over the world. The spams invite other "real bulkers" to join him in peddling a thingy-enlargement pill called Pinacle.
"Everybody wants a bigger thingy, so this product pulls a massive amount of sales ... All you do is MAIL, MAIL, MAIL. And collect your commission check," claim Bridger's invitations.
For more than three years, Bridger has deftly balanced the most difficult task of a spammer (or "bulk mailer," to use the term he prefers): giving out enough contact information to make a sale without putting the whole operation at risk.
For Bridger, keeping a grip on his own identity may be another challenge. When he's tired or distracted and the cellphone chirps to life, Bridger might even have to pause and ask himself: What is my name today?
Legally, the man who goes by the name Bridger appears to be Davis Wolfgang Hawke, a former white-power activist who renounced his birth name, Andrew Britt Greenbaum, in 1996 at the age of 18. But in the late '90s Hawke also went by the moniker Bo Decker. At the time, he was head of the Knights of Freedom Nationalist Party, one of the fastest growing neo-Nazi groups in the United States, which he later renamed the American Nationalist Party while a student at Wofford College in South Carolina.
But he hasn't really used the names Decker or Hawke online for years. Those identities imploded in 1999, shortly after word got out that his father was a Jew from the Boston suburbs, and people started calling him a "kosher Nazi." The ANP and its leader crawled quietly under a rock.
Yet as his world was crumbling around him, Hawke vowed he'd make a comeback on the political scene. In an interview with Rolling Stone in late 1999, Hawke predicted he would run for "major public office" within a decade. But first, he would need "a lot of money to back me up."
So what does a former American Nationalist Party member do to make some quick bucks? In Hawke's case, he turned to thingy-enlargement pills -- and a host of other dodgy products, including human growth hormone, free government grants, inkjet-printer refills, extended car warranties, "eBay secrets" -- marketed via spam e-mail campaigns. Today, Hawke's spam operations -- Quiksilver Enterprises and Amazing Internet Products -- while nowhere near the biggest sources of junk e-mail on the Internet, may be among its more profitable spam-based enterprises.
The life of a spammer is not a dull one. Hawke must move quickly through the obscure back roads of the Net, abandoning the Internet domains that he uses to generate his spam in quick order after he is discovered by anti-spam vigilantes or other spam fighters. The trail he leaves behind him offers a bizarre look at the seedy world of spam entrepreneurship. White-power organizer turned thingy-pill spammer, he sounds like a fictional character in a bad comic novel. But he's quite real.
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.