Spam Kings: The Real Story Behind The High Rolling Hucksters Pushing Porn, Pills, And %*@)# Enlargements

by Brian S. McWilliams

Book Overview

"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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0596007329
• Release Date: January 2005
• Publisher: Oreilly & Associates Inc
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.52 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.8" x 1.2" x 5.9"

Customer Reviews

It's a sleazy world

This is about the personal lives, and the trials and tribulations of spammers and spam fighters. A more motley crew of miscreants and their enemies would be hard to imagine. Sickie number one would be Davis Wolfgang Hawke (aka "Bo Decker," "Michael Girdley," etc.) one-time founder and leader of his self-styled Neo-Nazi group, the Knights of Freedom. He got started in Web hustling by selling knives and Nazi paraphernalia on Ebay. When it was discovered that his birth name was Andrew Britt Greenbaum and that his father was Jewish, he quite naturally lost a lot of cache with his Neo-Nazi followers, and so he closed down his storm trooper Website and turned to spam. He discovered that he had a natural talent for writing the sort of copy that sells sex pheromones, pyramid schemes, porn, and other spam "products," and before he knew it he was hiding stashes of hundred-dollar bills all over his various digs and the nearby countryside. Sickie number two would be Brad Bournival, Hawke's geeky chess-playing protege who made a million dollars spamming penis enlargements pills and such. Other sickies include big-timer Scott Richter of OptInRealBig who followed 9/11 and the anthrax attacks with flag and gas mask spamming, a kind of low-life huckster with a genius for turning public events into personal wealth. Also mentionable is the really sad Thomas Cowles who hustled mass mailing software but got thrown in jail for criminal contempt of court after allegedly stealing some computer equipment from South Florida spam king Eddy Marin. The white hats include Susan "Shiksaa" Gunn, Piers "Mad Pierre" Forrest, Francis Uy, Pete Wellborn, Steve Linford and others, many of whom frequented the antispam Web newsgroup Nanae. Compromised and perhaps characteristic of a third category of spam-world denizens would be Karen Hoffman, one-time spam fighter who crossed over to the dark side to work for spammers. What is really amazing is just how readable this book is. McWilliams has the narrative talent of a novelist, and the investigative skills of a top drawer journalist. I found this bizarre story of greed and human depravity in cyberspace as "unputdownable" as a best-selling true crime tale--which it is. This also serves as a sort of history of outline spam, chronicling the lives and times of those involved while reporting on the various measures taken by email providers and governments to combat the flood of unsolicited bulk emails. As for the future of spam and spam-fighters, McWilliams gives this appraisal: "...the pernicious root of the spam crisis does not appear to be legislative or technological. It is human..." He adds, "The ability to move relatively incognito online may have created a perfect medium for surreptitious e-marketers...But the Internet has also engendered a corresponding segment of consumers. Call them furtive shoppers" who have a desire for stuff that needs to be delivered in plain, brown wrappers. He concludes, "...spammers sel

Even Better Than The Cuckoo's Egg

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 o

Excellent Book...

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...

Enlightening and Essential Reading

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.

The Dirty Work of Spammers Revealed

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.