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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #325515 in Books
• Published on: 2004-09
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

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.

About the Author
Brian McWilliams has been reporting on business and technology issues for over twenty years. His articles have appeared in online publications such as Wired.com and Salon.com as well as in magazines including PC World, Computerworld, InformationWeek, CFO, Across the Board, and Inc. McWilliams gained international attention in 2002 when he wrote about the contents of Saddam Hussein's email inbox.

Customer Reviews

excellent book on spam
This book is a page turner. The book provides a fast-paced account of spammers and spam fighters, their business practices and respective struggles online and offline. I had picked up the book, simply because I was curious about the motivations of spammers and often wondered: What kind of a person is a spammer and who would respond to those emails and actually buy from them anyway? This book can be an eye-opener and I certainly learned a lot from it. Fun side note: A lot of supporting material is available online, as the spam wars are being fought mostly online. Chances are, you'll find yourself browsing news groups and forums to research and find out more about the various people being discussed in the book. The author also provides a blog where he discusses spam and other topics close to his book.

It's A Dirty World
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

too long, not enough technical detail
Maybe I am being unkind with 3 stars. The prose style is good. The author has done plenty of research into the background of the spammers and anti-spammers and the book is an intereesting read.
At 300 pages (excluding intro, glossary, notes, index) it is too long. It could usefully have been trimmed to 200 pages.
Anyone wanting nitty-gritty technical detail is out of luck. There is almost none. [I suspect Inside the Spam Cartel is better from that point of view, but I have only glanced at it so far.]
The book is also unbalanced. Yes, spammers are awful. They make email hard to use (one of my email addresses is widely publicised and as a result I get over 100 spam/day, sometimes rising to two or three times that). They have almost wrecked a direct marketing tool that could have benefited consumers and producers alike. But civilised societies do not support lynch mobs etc, and if you read the book carefully, the anti-spammers often seem to break as many laws as the spammers (in a good cause, of course). I was reminded sometimes of the animal rights protesters in the UK (except that the anti-spammers have not physically attacked people or property).
Part of the problem is that the lawmakers seem to be technically inept - CAN-SPAM is not an inspiring achievement.