Spam Kings: The Real Story behind the High-Rolling Hucksters Pushing Porn, Pills, and %*@)# Enlargements [Hardcover]

If you are looking for technical measures to fight against spam, look elsewhere. This is a book that helps you understand why spammers send spam, how they start their carers and how their techniques have evolved throughout the last years. This book is centered on a few spammers which are probably not the most noteworthy and do not deserve the name of "Spam kings" themselves but the author shows that he has made an excellent work documenting and researching the story of spammers.

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 sell whatever people will buy from them." (pp. 296-297)

So, the spam problem (costing the world $25-billion a year--estimate by the UN's International Telecommunications Union, p. 295) is not likely to go away until somebody changes human nature. As soon as the large ISPs such as AOL and Yahoo! find a way to filter out spam, spammers find a new way to get around their filters. Short of draconian measures, it would appear that spam at some level of annoyance will continue to be with us for years to come.