From the book lists at Adware Report:

All information current as of 01:47:13 Pacific Time, Monday, 31 January 2005. Spam Kings: The Real Story behind the High-Rolling Hucksters Pushing Porn, Pills, and %*@)# Enlargements    by Brian S. McWilliams   Hardcover:     O'Reilly     September, 2004    US$15.61       Usually ships in 24 hours Click the button below to . . .      (which will add the book to your Amazon U.S.A. "Shopping Cart") . . . or use your browser's Back button to return to the search-list page.

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Editorial description(s):

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.

Book Description
More than sixty percent of today's email traffic is spam, according to email filtering firm Brightmail. This year alone, five trillion spam messages will clog Internet users in-boxes, costing society an estimated $10-billion in lost productivity, filtering software, and other expenses. Spam Kings: The Real Story behind the High-Rolling Hucksters Pushing Porn, Pills, and %*@)# Enlargements is the first book to expose the shadowy world of the people responsible for the junk email problem. Author and veteran investigative journalist Brian S. McWilliams delivers a compelling account of the cat-and-mouse game played by spam entrepreneurs in search of easy fortunes and those who are trying to stop them. Spam Kings chronicles the evolution of Davis Wolfgang Hawke, a notorious neo-Nazi leader (Jewish-born) who got into junk email in 1999. Using Hawke as a case study, Spam Kings traces the twenty-year-old neophyte's rise in the spam trade to his emergence as 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 is reluctantly drawn into the spam wars and eventually joins a group of anti-spam activists. Her volunteer sleuth work puts her on a collision course with Hawke and other spammers, who try to wreak revenge on the antis. You'll also meet other cyber-vigilantes who have taken up the fight against spammers as well as the cast of quirky characters who comprise Hawke's business associates. The 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.




Reader review(s):

Spam Spam Spam..lovely SPAM!, November 10, 2004
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.

An open sore on the rear end of the Internet, November 2, 2004
The book gives a fascinating glimpse at some of the spammers who are clogging your mailbox. In the general press, there have been occasional interviews with a few public spammers. Like an article in the New York Times in 2003 that described two such spammers in Los Angeles. But for the most part, spammers wisely avoid the limelight. McWilliams delves into the background of several. The book shows good old fashioned investigative journalism. The machinations of the wretched filth are amazing.

He also gives us insight into various antispammers that have arisen to combat this miserable scourge. Most notably, of Steve Linford, who runs Spamhaus, which is a global blacklist of the more egregrious spammers.

There is no happy ending to this book, unlike a work of fiction. The methods described to fight spam have limited efficacy. Spam is clearly shown to be a chronic problem. An open sore on the rear end of the Internet.

A look into the battle lines around spam, November 2, 2004
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.

An interesting look inside the world of spammers..., October 23, 2004
(...)

The story follows a number of spammers as they take their first steps into the world of unsolicited bulk mailings, and how they learn to evade the laws and regulations designed to shut them down. At the same time, you're reading about a group of anti-spammers who take spam seriously and make it their primary goal to shut these people down. The detective work and technical skill exhibited by both sides is quite incredible, and it's amazing to read what type of lengths both sides go to in order to win their battles.

Most of the story revolves around Davis Hawke, a neo-Nazi who is evading his past to make his fortune in internet marketing, and Susan Gunn, a determined anti-spammer who soon becomes the queen of the anti-spammers. Along the way, you meet a number of other interesting characters on both sides of the issue. You'll also read about the internet groups like Spamhaus.org and NANAE who police this activity and battle the spammers every step of the way. And even though there are no acts of violence carried out, the physical threats are real, and many of the escalations are scary. When you have spammers posting your name, address, and phone number on the web with pictures of where you live, things can get dicey.

The book doesn't necessarily have one of those "feel good" endings. Spammers still spam, and some of the players in the book are still evading the law. Furthermore, you don't walk away with a number of ideas on how to combat the problem. This is more along of the lines of an autobiography that takes you up to a couple months ago, but could be continued and added to each year. You won't finish the book feeling optimistic, but you'll understand the players much better than you did.

Excellent Book..., December 20, 2004
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...

The Dirty Work of Spammers Revealed, December 1, 2004
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.

engaging story of spammers and anti-spammers, November 13, 2004
Brian McWilliams has written an engaging behind-the-scenes look at the world of spammers and anti-spammers. The central focus is on an account of Davis Hawke, who went from running neo-Nazi websites from his college dorm room to running a major spam ring and becoming a fugitive from lawsuits. In parallel, he tells the story of anti-spammer Shiksaa and her attempts to get spammers to stop. Both are fascinating stories, and well chosen to represent the roles. Along the way, McWilliams tells us the story of Karen Hoffmann, an anti-spammer who ended up working for a spammer, of Scott Richter, well known from his appearance on The Daily Show as a "high-volume email deployer," the Time Travel spammer, and others. There are brief appearances from top spammers Alan Ralsky and Eddy Marin, with the requisite and appropriate mentions of their criminal records.

The accounts McWilliams presents show spammers to be essentially con artists, people who make a living openly flouting the law by selling products with deceptive and fraudulent claims, without a care for the damages they cause in the process. Some apparently deceive themselves, maintaining that they are helping people by giving them what they want, ignoring the costs they offload onto
others in the process. Hawke comes across as an intelligent but sociopathic personality, manipulative of others and incapable of participating in any genuine human relationship.

In the end, it's clear from the minimal penalties imposed by the law in the United States are not acting as a deterrent to this activity--the characters in this book appear, with only a couple of exceptions, to be undeterred. It remains to be seen if the criminal conviction of Jeremy Jaynes, who was sentenced to nine years of jail time, will be the first in a series of criminal prosecutions that will have some deterrent effect.

Even Better Than The Cuckoo's Egg, January 4, 2005
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.


Informative and Entertaining, December 26, 2004
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. To a long-time internet addict such as myself, seeing such a thing is rather surreal. But it's something I should get used to, as the world of the web is interacting more and more with the "real world" as this book clearly shows.

Back to the point. I had sometimes idly wondered about spammers. Who they are, how successful they could really be. This book explores that by telling the story of a few major and minor spammers, as well as the anti-spammers that work so hard to defend normal people from their aggressive advertising tactics. I'd known about MAPS, RBL, Samhaus, and Spews, but I never knew much about the specifics of how and why they were created until I read this -- this book even explores how they operate!

Best of all, this is a story about spam. All true, not dull (often dramatic!), and very informative. I suspect this is just one person's perspective of the spam world, and the people mentioned in the book are just a portion of the spammers and spam fighters working everyday (no doubt some were miffed by not being included). But the book is effective in educating people like myself in the spam underground. It also makes me more informed when I hear new news about spammers being prosecuted or new spam laws being enacted.

The only problem with this book is an unavoidable one. Because the spam wars are ongoing, the story is never over. I can see a "Spam Kings 2" being released in 5 years to catch up on what's happened. To keep folloing the spammers and spam fighters in their battles.

Important, Engaging, and Entertaining, December 18, 2004
Mr. McWilliams brilliantly taught me about an area I knew little about, which it was important to know about, as it effects me everyday, as I wade through hundreds of pieces of spam, which wastes my time, and saps my precious bodily fluids.

Engaging, entertaining, I couldn't put it down. I read it through in one sitting, refusing to eat or sleep until I inhaled the very last morsel. A ten-star read, and I am happy, happy.

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