Spam Kings: The Real Story behind the High-Rolling Hucksters Pushing Porn, Pills, and %*@)# Enlargements
Posted on July 22, 2009
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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 lik…
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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.
4.0 out of 5 stars
I went to high school with Hawke!
Quite a fun read. I’ve been following the downward spiral of Westwood High School’s class of 1996′s best known alumni since he became an internet nazi.
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.
5.0 out of 5 stars
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.
4.0 out of 5 stars
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.
3.0 out of 5 stars
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…
2.0 out of 5 stars
Left Me Feeling Covered In Ick
This is the story of spammers, and those who despise them, the anti-spammers. Basically the spammers do as they please (spam, do Joe-jobs, etc.
5.0 out of 5 stars
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…
4.0 out of 5 stars
A look at what goes on behind the spam
Spam is no longer a nuisance. It has developed into a huge problem for organizations that have to deal with the millions of e-mails that flood their mailboxes, often delivering…
3.0 out of 5 stars
Strong Start – Fades Out
This book started out strong, reminding me of some of Steven Levy’s better work (Crypto, Hackers). However, it fades out towards the end of the book, seeming to lose its focus.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Informative and Entertaining
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.
5.0 out of 5 stars
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…