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

~ Brian S. McWilliams (Author)
Key Phrases: spam kings, spam opponents, email opponents, Davis Hawke, Mad Pierre, Empire Towers (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

With monikers like Shiksaa, Dr. Fatburn, Mad Pierre and Terri Tickle, the subjects of McWilliams's debut often sound cut straight from pulp or comic-book noir farce— despite being real. A brisk narrative sets immediately on the trail of one of them: Davis Hawke, a chess-geek neo-Nazi turned spam lord. We also meet Shiksaa, a frustrated AOL user turned antispam vigilante who, along with a posse of like-minded netizens, fights running battles with spammers like Hawke, the man behind countless herbal Viagra offers and get-rich-quick schemes. McWilliams, an experienced business and technology reporter, manages, at his best, to make stories of people glued to their computers read like a thriller. His true (if virtual) crime tale's quick pacing and use of online exchanges provide relief from details of how, technically, spam kings operate (not always gripping moments: "Hawke purchased and downloaded a copy of Extractor Pro from the company's Web site"). This helps McWilliams pull a lively tale from the messy web of computer-geek criminality and righteous antispammer reprisal—and one from which spam-beleaguered computer users may take heart.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Product Description

"People are stupid", Davis Wolfgang Hawke thought as he stared at the nearly empty box of Swastika pendants on his desk. So begins Spam Kings, an investigative look into the shady world of email spammers and the people trying to stop them.

More than sixty percent of today's email traffic is spam. In 2004 alone, five trillion spam messages clogged Internet users‚ in-boxes, costing society an estimated $10 billion in filtering software and lost productivity.

This compelling exposé explores the shadowy world of the people responsible for today‚s rapidly spreading junk-email epidemic. Investigative journalist Brian S. McWilliams delivers a fascinating account of the cat-and-mouse game played by spam entrepreneurs in search of easy fortunes and those who are trying to stop them.

McWilliams chronicles the activities of several spam kings, including Davis Wolfgang Hawke, a notorious Jewish-born neo-Nazi leader who began his spamming career 1999. The book traces this twenty-year-old neophyte's rise in the trade, where he became a major player in the lucrative penis pill market--a business that would eventually make him a millionaire and the target of lawsuits from AOL and others.

Spam Kings also tells the parallel story of Susan Gunn, a computer novice in California who was reluctantly drawn into the spam wars and eventually joined a group of anti-spam activists. Her volunteer sleuthing put her on a collision course with Hawke and other spammers, who sought revenge on their pursuers. Other intriguing anti-spam cyber-vigilantes appear throughout the book, as well as a cast of quirky characters who comprise Hawke's business associates.

The book sheds light on the technical sleight-of-hand and sleazy business practices that spammers use–forged headers, open relays, harvesting tools, and bulletproof hosting. It also explores the work of top anti-spam attorneys, the surprising new partnership developing between spammers and computer hackers, the ominous rise of a new breed of computer viruses designed to turn the PCs of innocent bystanders into secret spam factories, and the troubling advent of cell phone spamming.

Brian McWilliams is a veteran investigative journalist who has covered business and technology for Web magazines including Wired News and Salon as well as the Washington Post, PC World, Computerworld, and Inc. magazine. The author of hundreds of articles about spam, Internet security, and online consumer protection, McWilliams gained international attention in 2002 when he wrote about the contents of Saddam Hussein's email inbox for Wired News. He has appeared on NBC Nightly News, Fox News, BBC Radio, NPR's "Here and Now" and PRI's "Marketplace" programs, and has been quoted by the International Herald Tribune, the Boston Globe, and the New York Times.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1st edition (September 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596007329
• ISBN-13: 978-0596007324
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #449,915 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Spam Spam Spam..lovely SPAM!, November 9, 2004

By	Todd Hawley (San Francisco CA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A look into the battle lines around spam, November 1, 2004

By	E. Wuehler (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Even Better Than The Cuckoo's Egg, January 3, 2005

By	Frank Mitch (Akron, Ohio USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.