Customer Reviews

Spam Kings: The Real Story behind the High-Rolling Hucksters Pushing Porn, Pills, and %*@)# Enlargements

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This engaging book is a kind of "history" of spam wars, involving several people, the most notable of the spammers themselves, and the people who chose to fight them. And this indeed is a war, with both sides resorting to nasty tactics to try to get the other side to back down. McWilliams describes numerous stories in this book, from the antics of Hawke Davis and his countless spam campaigns, of Shiksaa, the dedicated anti spammer and her initial desire to try to show the spammers the "right way" of doing business only to get in the middle of the "war," of "Terri Tickle," a man posing as a female; of Scott Richter, one of the larger figures in the spam war and numerous other figures on both sides of the issue.

One thing I noticed throughout this book was the exceedingly high level of nastiness and contempt shown by the spammers. It proves once again there are lots of predators in the online world. No, this isn't a book about how to get rid of spam or guard yourself against it, but it does provide a fascinating story of greed, stupidity (on the part of those who do indeed buy product from spammers), and how some dedicated individuals are trying to put an end to it.

I picked this up and didn't put it down until I had read the whole book. The writing got me hooked and I had to see how it ended. Strangely, though, it doesn't really end. Despite the non-ending, I enjoyed reading the story of spammers and those people fighting spam.

The book is kind of a pseudo-biography of various real-life characters, hiding behind online personas. There are the spammers and their attempts to get junk to your inbox. There are the anti-spammers who track down the spammers and report that information to various spam fighting web sites. There are also several side stories to provide the setting and context for the story.

What I found most interesting was the fact that you could go out to the web sites referenced in the book and validate the information yourself. After reading the book, I went out to the NANAE (news.admin.net-abuse.email) group on Google and searched on some of the characters in the book. [ You'll find a discussion about this book itself as well - disagreements between some of the character's recollections of events and the author's descriptions - very entertaining ]

It was both an interesting and educational read, which I enjoyed. While I have a pretty good spam filter, it was educational to look at the spam that gets through my email fitler with a new perspective. I could track the originator of the spam to one of the spammers described in the book using web servers in China.

It makes you wonder how to fix the spam problem - or if there even is a fix.

This spy thriller story will be of interest to anyone using email today, experts or beginners. It will not tell you how to avoid the always coming spam garbage. It will give you an inside look at the methods used by the spammers and reveal the dedicated efforts of individual anti-spammers who continue to fight the world's biggest spammers.

There is fast moving action in every chapter. It took a few pages to realize it is not fiction. The very first paragraph is indicative of much more to come: "People are stupid, Davis Wolfgang Hawke thought as he stared at the nearly empty boxes of swastika pendants on his desk. It was April 22, 1999, two days after the one-hundredth anniversary of Adolph Hitler's birth. Orders for the red-and-black necklace had been pouring into his Knights of Freedom Nationalist Party web site every week since he built it nine months ago. The demand nearly outstripped what his supplier could provide. Hawke gazed out the window of his mobile home at the hazy South Carolina sky and thought: This is the ultimate hypocrisy. If even half of these people actually joined the party, I would have a major political movement. Instead all they want is a pretty, shiny pendant."
Davis Hawke, the leading character in this book, is exposed in the first chapter by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a Jew who is hiding his heritage after changing his name from Andrew Britt Greenbaum upon graduating from high school in 1996.

The first paragraph quoted above gives you a taste of the author's writing style, a lot of detail and descriptive prose in every paragraph. Some of the language is obscene.

Through eleven chapters we follow the parallel paths of Hawke and female spammer tracker Shiksaa (Susan Gunn) through the spam underworld. Readers will meet bizarre characters including:
- Sanford Wallace (Spam is a first amendment right).
- Jason Vale (Laetrile for cancer).
- Rodona Garst (Stock pump and dump scams by email).
- Thomas Cowles (Anonymous mortgages and pornography).
- Terri DiSisto (Home videos of young men being tickled).
- Alan Moore (Dr. Fatburn, diet pills and pirated software).
- Scott Richter (Internet's biggest "opt in" junk email operation).

The 11 page index contains many names, organizations, and references. Eight pages in a Glossary contain a long list of terms and definitions. Fourteen pages of Notes fooled me into believing this to be a very scholarly writing with appropriate End Note documentation. Not so, it is almost all a kind of calendar of dates when various events or emails occurred. These could easily have been included in the main text.

It was amazing to type Davis Hawke into Google and receive 157,000 entries, many of them for the leading Spam King in this book. Readers will have similar surprises when they do a search for the other characters or organizations. In the Epilogue there is no happy ending to this book. Davis Hawke has so far escaped the jail sentence some others have received. The CAN-SPAM act has done little to help.

The book gives a fascinating glimpse at some of the spammers who are clogging your mailbox. In the general press, there have been occasional interviews with a few public spammers. Like an article in the New York Times in 2003 that described two such spammers in Los Angeles. But for the most part, spammers wisely avoid the limelight. McWilliams delves into the background of several. The book shows good old fashioned investigative journalism. The machinations of the wretched filth are amazing.

He also gives us insight into various antispammers that have arisen to combat this miserable scourge. Most notably, of Steve Linford, who runs Spamhaus, which is a global blacklist of the more egregrious spammers.

There is no happy ending to this book, unlike a work of fiction. The methods described to fight spam have limited efficacy. Spam is clearly shown to be a chronic problem. An open sore on the rear end of the Internet.

S*PAM _KiNgS is one of those running narrative stories that may or may not be entirely accurate but when you study a group more nefarious than the mafia, it serves as a useful guide to find out who was behind those SPAM bombs in the early days.

I myself once battled those forces of dark evil known as spammers. Having cut my teeth on an Apple IIe and having entered the Internet Age using FTP, I saw a promising new medium get destroyed by the Spam creeps who sold their snake oil to the gullable.

The Internet suffers from the "Tragedy of the Commons", an economic theory that any common resource; water, fish, grazing fields, or Internet pipeline must be either managed by government agencies or privatized or it will be destroyed by capitalizm. Sadly, the behavior of humans and nothing more, is to blame.

I will end my review with a note of honors (you know who you are) to those who battled the Spammers, and to those who exploited the internet for selfish interests, I would send you something else but it would probably be illegal...

This book sheds light on the technical sleight-of-hand - -forged headers, open relays, harvesting tools, and bulletproof hosting - -and other sleazy business practices that spammers use; the work of top anti-spam attorneys; the surprising new partnership developing between spammers and computer hackers; and the rise of a new breed of computer viruses designed to turn the PCs of innocent bystanders into secret spam factories.

Author McWilliams does a marvelous job of telling the story of how junk email has evolved to the point of being such a nagging problem for most all computer owners, and this story is an important contribution to the growing literature on computer and information technology history. In addition, he updates readers on the status of the main spammers, as of 2004, providing a glimmer of hope that international anti-spam efforts may one day result in the end to this obnoxious annoyance.

All IT professionals and anyone with a computer will find the book to be a delightful read, and will be intrigued by the tale that required extensive digging by this hard working author.

This book is both enlightening and essential reading for those interested in technology and the Internet, the benefits and hazards of global communications, today's mass culture, and whodoneit's and scoundrels. McWilliams brilliantly weaves together spellbinding, and surreal, true tales from start to finish.

After reading this book I felt the need to take a shower.

The world of spam isn't for those who don't want to get their hands dirty... really dirty.

A unique look at the world of spamming, Brian McWilliams outlines what the life of a spammer is like, profiling a handful of spam magnates from the early 2000s (the book focuses on the years 2000-2004 when this was published), and the individuals that work on stopping them from achieving their #1 priority, separating you from YOUR money.

When you read 'Spam Kings' you will discover the lifestyle of a spammer and how/why so many e-mails get into your inbox every day promoting anything from viagra to pirated software and anything else inbetween. You will learn about why when you click the 'From' part of an e-mail you are not able to always determine where this message originated from, and how so many messages (hint: we're talking more than just millions) get delivered in such a little amount of time.

Before reading this book I had a general idea of the type of person that would send spam - what they might look like, how they act, the software used to push so many messages out, but what I was ignorant of was the type and amount of people out there fighting the flow of spam from getting into users email accounts. As much as there is a sect of individuals trying to get spam moved to your inbox, there is another group trying to get this email to never grace your eyes. Anti-spammers (as they are called) frequent discussion groups, contact spammers on their own, and manage lists that are used to make sure that ISPs don't allow spammers to even reach you as hard as they might try.

Brian McWilliams covers a lot of ground in this book, and it's a fascinating look at the underground world of spam. Whether you are a major or minor part of the computer world, this analysis is well worth a look to discover more about why there are so many spammers out there in cyberspace and why many of them are filthy rich.

The only complaint I might have with this book is it seems a bit too long (even at 333 pages) and the author bounces all over the place when he discusses different spammers throughout the book. I understand that he is trying to give many examples and track spammers movements all along the same timelines throughout the book, but it seemed a little too jumpy at times. Not enough so that a reader couldn't follow what was going on, but if a case study approach (chapter by chapter analysis of different spammers) was used instead, this might have been the better approach.

Still, an enlightening read and well worth the time to pick up.

**** RECOMMENDED

The first thing that struck me about this book is that it takes years of emails, newsgroups, and chat sessions and turns it into a story. To a long-time internet addict such as myself, seeing such a thing is rather surreal. But it's something I should get used to, as the world of the web is interacting more and more with the "real world" as this book clearly shows.

Back to the point. I had sometimes idly wondered about spammers. Who they are, how successful they could really be. This book explores that by telling the story of a few major and minor spammers, as well as the anti-spammers that work so hard to defend normal people from their aggressive advertising tactics. I'd known about MAPS, RBL, Samhaus, and Spews, but I never knew much about the specifics of how and why they were created until I read this -- this book even explores how they operate!

Best of all, this is a story about spam. All true, not dull (often dramatic!), and very informative. I suspect this is just one person's perspective of the spam world, and the people mentioned in the book are just a portion of the spammers and spam fighters working everyday (no doubt some were miffed by not being included). But the book is effective in educating people like myself in the spam underground. It also makes me more informed when I hear new news about spammers being prosecuted or new spam laws being enacted.

The only problem with this book is an unavoidable one. Because the spam wars are ongoing, the story is never over. I can see a "Spam Kings 2" being released in 5 years to catch up on what's happened. To keep folloing the spammers and spam fighters in their battles.

Brian McWilliams has written an engaging behind-the-scenes look at the world of spammers and anti-spammers. The central focus is on an account of Davis Hawke, who went from running neo-Nazi websites from his college dorm room to running a major spam ring and becoming a fugitive from lawsuits. In parallel, he tells the story of anti-spammer Shiksaa and her attempts to get spammers to stop. Both are fascinating stories, and well chosen to represent the roles. Along the way, McWilliams tells us the story of Karen Hoffmann, an anti-spammer who ended up working for a spammer, of Scott Richter, well known from his appearance on The Daily Show as a "high-volume email deployer," the Time Travel spammer, and others. There are brief appearances from top spammers Alan Ralsky and Eddy Marin, with the requisite and appropriate mentions of their criminal records.

The accounts McWilliams presents show spammers to be essentially con artists, people who make a living openly flouting the law by selling products with deceptive and fraudulent claims, without a care for the damages they cause in the process. Some apparently deceive themselves, maintaining that they are helping people by giving them what they want, ignoring the costs they offload onto
others in the process. Hawke comes across as an intelligent but sociopathic personality, manipulative of others and incapable of participating in any genuine human relationship.

In the end, it's clear from the minimal penalties imposed by the law in the United States are not acting as a deterrent to this activity--the characters in this book appear, with only a couple of exceptions, to be undeterred. It remains to be seen if the criminal conviction of Jeremy Jaynes, who was sentenced to nine years of jail time, will be the first in a series of criminal prosecutions that will have some deterrent effect.