"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.
