Hell hath no fury like a woman spammed – take, for example, Susan Gunn, better known in Internet newsgroups as Shiksaa, the queen of all spam fighters.
And hell hath spawned few more odious characters than Davis Hawke, born Andrew Britt Greenbaum, who failed spectacularly as a neo-Nazi organizer before finding his true calling as a high-volume spammer.
Hawke and Gunn are but two of a long list of real-life heroes and villains who emerge in blazing color from the pages of Brian McWilliams’ recently published book, Spam Kings – The Real Story Behind the High-Rolling Hucksters Pushing Porn, Pills and @*#?% Enlargements. (Just for the record, we are allowed to use the word “penis” in Network World, although McWilliams’ publisher, O’Reilly, apparently decided it was too much for a book jacket.)
Spam Kings is nonfiction but reads like a lively novel, which means it should appeal not only to IT professionals looking to better understand their enemy but anyone who has a passing interest in the spam world’s inner workings.
A pretty sight it is not. The spammers come across as even more unscrupulous and personally dislikable than you might imagine – trust me, that’s possible. The bigger fish appear to make money hand over grubby fist, they couldn’t care less about your complaints, and with precious few exceptions they treat law enforcement efforts and civil lawsuits like an in-box full of their junk: delete, delete, delete.
The anti-spammers – or antis, as they’re known – seemingly spend half their waking hours jousting with spammers online, thwarting spammer-initiated distributed DoS attacks, and, irony of expensive ironies, defending themselves against nuisance lawsuits filed by the bad guys. The antis will make you glad that someone is fighting this dirty fight . . . and doubly glad that it isn’t you.
A reader gets the distinct impression that there’s a sense of community but not much honor among spammers.
“One of the biggest surprises was how interconnected many of the players in the spam business are,” says McWilliams, a longtime technology journalist. “Several of the ‘Spam Kings’ have at one time been business partners with each other. Yet they may not even know it, because spammers typically use aliases or hide behind constantly morphing corporate identities.”
Watching the spammers turn on one another is among the book’s more pleasurable elements, while watching a few of the antis wander over to the dark side adds a disturbing counterweight.
“As I got into the research, I was also surprised at how bizarre the central figure, Davis Hawke, was,” McWilliams says. “Because of his neo-Nazi background, I knew from the start that he was a strange character. But as I dug further, I kept finding out amazing stuff about him, such as the fact that he buried most of his spam earnings in the woods, or that he kept a live-in prostitute, or that his great-grandfather was a civil rights activist.”
Despite being ruled in default on a lawsuit filed against him by AOL, Hawke continues spamming to this day, according to McWilliams. A number of the spammers are revealed as truly troubled individuals, even borderline sympathetic – the so-called “Time travel spammer” being Exhibit A – but Hawke is not to be counted among them.
While the book isn’t about solving the spam problem, McWilliams does have an opinion on the likelihood of that happening.
“As I say in the epilogue, I’m not optimistic that the spam problem will go away anytime soon,” he says. “The root of the problem is not flaws in SMTP or weak laws or rogue ISPs. The problem is that people buy from spammers. Until this market of what I call ‘furtive shoppers’ dries up, we’ll have to continue to rely on technology and laws to shield us from the pollution.”
My spam magnet is buzz@nww.com.
