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

O'Reilly Media, 2004. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. More than sixty percent of today's email traffic is spam, according to emai l filtering firm Brightmail. This year alone, five trillion spam messages w ill 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 i nvestigative journalist Brian S. McWilliams delivers a compelling account o f the cat-and-mouse game played by spam entrepreneurs in search of easy for tunes and those who are trying to stop them. Spam Kings chronicles the evolution of Davis Wolfgang Hawke, a notorious ne o-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 tar get of lawsuits from AOL and others. Spam Kings also tells the parallel story of Susan Gunn, a computer novice i n California who is reluctantly drawn into the spam wars and eventually joi ns 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 f ight against spammers as well as the cast of quirky characters who comprise Hawke's business associates. The book sheds light on the technical sleight-o.