Internet giant searches for hidden gold in garden of Nazi e-mail pest

AOL plans to go digging for gold in the garden of the internet’s notorious “Spam Nazi”.

The treasure hunt comes after he defaulted on a court judgment ordering him to pay the internet company $12.8 million (£6.7 million) in damages for flooding its members with unwanted e-mail adverts. The spammer has now disappeared.

Davis Wolfgang Hawke, a former neo-Nazi, and his partners made up to $600,000 (£315,000) a month from unsolicited advertisements for pornography, weight-loss tablets, mortgages and penis- enlargement pills.

AOL says that it has receipts showing that Mr Hawke, 28, bought bars of gold and platinum with his profits, and it wants to find them. The company believes that he buried the ingots in the two-acre garden of his parents’ home, 20 miles southwest of Boston, which was his last known address.