Spam Kings
Brian S McWilliams
Editor
Allen Noren
Copyright © 2008 Brian McWilliams
O'Reilly Media
* * *
Dedication
To my family
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Acknowledgment
The genesis of this book was an unusual onslaught of junk email in May 2003. Over the course of two weeks, I received over one hundred spams for pills and other products that I traced to a company in nearby Manchester, New Hampshire. I discovered spammers practically in my backyard and decided to tell the world about it.
I am grateful to my editors at Salon.com, especially Andrew Leonard, as well as my editors at Wired News, including David Ian Miller, for encouraging me that summer to write about the company, Amazing Internet Products LLC, and its fascinating founders. Thanks also to Mark Beavis and Jon Greenberg of New Hampshire Public Radio for working with me to advance the story further for radio.
I am indebted to my agent, Martha Jewett, for recognizing that a book about some of the major figures behind the spam problem was long overdue. Martha's help in conceiving Spam Kings was immensely important to me.
My editor at O'Reilly, Allen Noren, guided this project with just the right mix of hard-boiled skepticism and patient handholding. Nothing motivates an author like knowing your editor is a better writer. Special thanks to Allen and to the rest of the team at O'Reilly for their dedication to this project.
I appreciate the help of John Levine, who provided a crucial technical review of the manuscript.
My initial research was greatly assisted by Piers Forrest and Gordon Shumway. Reporting on Davis Hawke's neo-Nazi years by Erik Hedegaard and Gary Henderson was a big inspiration. I am also grateful to the scores of people who provided important background but were not mentioned in the book, including Bill Cole, "Relic," Jeanne Kempthorne, Anne Mitchell, Dan Clements, Jeffrey Eilender, Brendan Battles, Stan McDonald, Bill Nelson, Tanya Bibeau, Ted Bernard, Andrew Broome, Blair Russell, and the numerous sources who've asked to remain anonymous.
I couldn't have written Spam Kings without the thousands of people who have sent their spam samples to the news.admin.net-abuse.sightings newsgroup. The Archive.org web site and Google Groups search engine were also essential to my research.
Finally, thanks to my family, especially my wife Diane, for accompanying me on this journey and for your feedback along the way.
Introduction
Most businesses jump at the opportunity for free publicity. But none of the email marketers, or spammers, profiled in this book were eager to see their stories in print. In fact, some have even threatened lawsuits over its publication.
No wonder that Spam Kings is the first book to publicly unmask the people behind the junk email problem. As Jennifer Archie, a leading anti-spam attorney, recently told me, a spammer's main protection is anonymity.
"Once you've exposed a spamming John Doe, he doesn't have a legal defense. So he'll guard his anonymity with everything he has," says Archie.
By deftly using anonymity, spammers have tapped into a vast market. Since most spam-related sales transactions are furtive, reliable statistics are hard to come by. But a study published by the U.S.-based Direct Marketing Association estimated that consumers spent over $32 billion in 2003 on products and services advertised by email.
In the process, some say spam has nearly ruined email. Over 60 percent of all email traffic in the first half of 2004 was spam, according to email filtering firm Brightmail. (Only three years ago, the volume of unsolicited commercial email was just 8 percent of all message traffic.) In 2004, an estimated five trillion spam messages will clog Internet users' in-boxes. AOL alone blocks over one billion spam messages every day. According to Ferris Research, junk email costs society $10 billion in lost productivity, filtering software, and other expenses.
Once a problem that vexed only Internet geeks, spam has now earned the ire of consumers, business leaders, lawmakers, regulators, and the mass media. For many, hearing "You've got mail" is no longer a happy sound.
The people behind the junk email problem are often unsavory characters running shady, if not outright illegal, businesses. So why descend into their world and find out what makes them tick? Why should we, as a society, need the gory details of how these high-tech hucksters make a buck?
As citizens, Internet-dependent businesses, and policy makers strategize for the next phase of the battle to save cyberspace, it's my hope that Spam Kings can provide an enlightening and entertaining response to the edict "know thy enemy."
Email was built on an architecture of openness and trust. But when spammers discovered the medium, they saw an opportunity that could be exploited. Like air pollution, overfishing, and roadside litter, spam represents the destruction of a public resource by private interests.
Internet users reacted to this overgrazing of their common land like angry villagers with pitchforks. They tried to run the junk emailers out of their virtual communities by publishing spam blacklists and closing off their networks to the abusers. In response, spammers learned a variety of stealthy tactics to disguise their acts and hide their identities.
Spam Kings chronicles five crucial years in the cat-and-mouse game between a dozen or so high-profile spammers and the people determined to drive them off the Internet. With perhaps thousands of spammers currently in operation and many, many people dedicated to fighting them, it's nearly impossible to tell the whole story of the junk email conundrum.
But study the rise and fall of one spammer, Davis Wolfgang Hawke, and you will learn nearly all you need to know about the intractability of the junk email problem.
Hawke is the central figure of Spam Kings, but not because he's the biggest spammer of all time. Hawke certainly had his successes. At the age of twenty-five, he became a millionaire by spamming penis-enlargement pills. In the process, he also became the target of numerous lawsuits designed to drive him out of business. A high-IQ chess player and honors student, Hawke chose spamming after his career as a brainy neo-Nazi leader imploded. Hawke put his pursuit of easy wealth ahead of everything else: his education, his family, his girlfriend, and even his own freedom.
Hawke's hubris leads him into a series of confrontations with spam opponents, the most important of whom is Susan Gunn. Gunn, a forty-something, mild-mannered computer novice, was dragged into the fight when her America Online account overflowed with spam. In time, her alias "Shiksaa" would strike fear into the heart of spammers everywhere.
Like many junk emailers, Hawke has the misfortune of crossing paths with Shiksaa, who becomes a volunteer for the anti-spam organization named Spamhaus. Throughout the book, she helps to unmask scores of spammers, and even land some in jail.
Spam Kings is the chronicle of Hawke's and Shiksaa's parallel paths through the spam underworld. Along the way, readers meet a bizarre cast of characters, including:
Sanford Wallace
One of the original spam kings, Wallace insists that spam is a First Amendment right. He buries the Internet with the stuff in the mid-90s. You'll learn what happens when lawyers from a dozen Internet service providers try to convince Wallace that there's nothing constitutional about spam.
Jason Vale
A champion arm-wrestler and cancer survivor, Vale gets into big legal trouble with America Online and the Food and Drug Administration for sending out spams promoting Laetrile as a cure for cancer. Vale blamed his legal problems on anti-spammers in general and Shiksaa in particular. But in the end, it is his own disregard for the law that landed h
im in jail.
Rodona Garst
She is a middle-class, white-collar worker living in the suburbs. So why is she running stock pump-and-dump scams by email? That's what an anti-spammer wants to find out when he hacks into Garst's computer and posted the embarrassing contents on the Internet.
Thomas Cowles
He's a lanky computer genius in Ohio who develops an assortment of technical tricks to "anonymize" his spams for everything from mortgages to pornography. But as it turns out, a short, middle-aged woman in his hometown tracks him down, outs him on her web site, and ultimately helps law enforcement put him behind bars.
Terri DiSisto
Not everyone is in junk email for the money. DiSisto spams the Internet in search of young men willing to sell homemade videos of themselves being tickled. But when Internet users decide to dig into DiSisto's past, they discover something shocking.
Alan Moore
Unlike most spammers, Moore doesn't hide behind fake names (although he prefers that his diet-pill customers call him "Dr Fatburn"). Moore even publishes his home address in his junk emails. But it turns out that Dr. Fatburn also has a big business selling pirated software via spam, which puts him in the legal crosshairs of two of the biggest technology companies in the world.
Scott Richter
He's a serial entrepreneur who discovers spam relatively late in the game. From the start, he forges alliances with anti-spammers as he builds one of the Internet's biggest "opt-in" junk email operations. But after Richter double-crosses Shiksaa, his empire begins to crumble. Soon, he's staring down the barrel of twin lawsuits from Microsoft and New York State.
You will discover that the line between spammers and anti-spammers is not always clear. The uneasy alliances between the two sides are shown here—along with the story of a handful of spam fighters who cross over to work for the "enemy."
This book is descriptive, not prescriptive. There is no Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem (although you will find some buried treasure on how to keep your in-box free of junk email). Spam Kings may not show you the road toward solving the spam problem. But after reading this book, you will know precisely how we got where we are today.
Brian McWilliams
Durham, New Hampshire
Chapter 1.
Birth of a Spam King
People are stupid, Davis Wolfgang Hawke thought as he stared at the nearly empty box of swastika pendants on his desk. It was April 22, 1999, two days after the one-hundredth anniversary of Adolph Hitler's birth. Dozens of orders for the red-and-black necklaces had been pouring into his Knights of Freedom (KOF) Nationalist Party web site every week since he built it nine months ago. The demand nearly outstripped what his supplier could provide, but Hawke wasn't celebrating his e-commerce success. As he stuffed the remaining pendants into padded envelopes and addressed them, 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.
And if a snoopy reporter for the local paper hadn't recently blown his cover, Hawke might not have been spending all of the web site's income on rent, telephone, and electricity bills for the double-wide just off Highway 221 in Chesnee. But Hawke was forced to move into the trailer in March, after secretly operating KOF.net for six months from the dorm room his parents paid for at Wofford College in nearby Spartanburg. Hawke had always been an anomaly at the pricey Methodist school, with his penchant for dressing all in black, wearing his dark hair in a ponytail, and sporting a push-broom mustache. But the 20-year-old junior had managed to hold down a 3.8 grade point average as a double major in German and history without anyone knowing he was also the founder and chief executive director of the Knights of Freedom. His room in Shipp Hall had been festooned with Nazi flags, Hitler videos, and a collection of knives, but Hawke did no proselytizing on campus. In fact, he had little social contact with other students.
Although his ultimate goal was one day to be elected the nation's first white-power president, Hawke knew he had to lay some groundwork before his philosophy would become mainstream. That task would make him a target for leftists and the media. To shield himself, even with party comrades and web site visitors, Hawke used the pseudonym "Bo Decker" and listed a post office box in Walpole, Massachusetts as the Knights of Freedom mailing address.
Over a thousand people signed up for his monthly email newsletter, the White Pride News Service. Some 200 people joined as dues-paying members, paying five dollars a month for a membership card, a KOF armband, a videotape of speeches by Decker, and a subscription to the newsletter. Not bad for a movement that had been unheard of a year earlier. In fact, the Anti-Defamation League had recently said that KOF was the fastest-growing neo-Nazi group in the United States. Using the alias Bo Decker, Hawke had introduced the world to the Knights of Freedom in an August 1998 posting to several online discussion groups: "We must band together in unity to defend our Race. Either we stand together and battle for the right to racial existence or we will be wiped out by international Jewry and their nigger police."
As Hawke saw it, the Knights of Freedom had two major things going for it: its web site and his brains. The KOF.net site, dressed all in black like its owner, was the best white-power site on the Internet. Besides the merchandise section, there was a chat room, press release section, message board, and automated sign-up forms—all the bells and whistles. At one point, Hawke even posted a note on the site's home page offering to provide web design and hosting to other white-power groups. Hawke and his lieutenants also knew how to use the Internet for promotion. They worked newsgroups and discussion lists, talking up the Knights of Freedom and its web site. Hawke had put an automatic hit counter on the front page of KOF.net, and he got a kick out of checking the traffic statistics every day. It intrigued him that you could publish a message in a newsgroup or send out the newsletter emails and then a few hours later watch the bar graphs on the stats page suddenly shoot up.
As for Hawke's mind, it was quantitative, analytical. It made him a top student in high school and a formidable chess player, and it made his college studies a snap. He could think several moves ahead of his opponents.
However, in a moment of hubris, Hawke posted a large photograph of himself on the front page of KOF.net. It showed the lanky Hawke dressed in a Nazi uniform, with his arm outstretched in a "Heil Hitler" salute. When a Wofford student was out web surfing one evening in early February and happened to run across the site, Hawke was undone.
Soon a front-page exposé appeared in the Spartanburg Herald-Journal that fingered Hawke as the head of KOF. It said that he used the site for recruiting and to stoke racist fervor among party members, who addressed him as "Commander." According to the article, the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that monitors hate groups, had been tracking him since he was in high school in Westwood, Massachusetts.
But what hit Hawke like a punch to the gut was a matter-of-fact statement in the article attributed to Mark Potok, the head of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Potok told the paper that Hawke was a Jew who, to hide his heritage, had changed his name from Andrew Britt Greenbaum upon graduating from high school in 1996.
The article buried what would become Hawke's standard rebuttal to the charges: that his father, Hyman Andrew Greenbaum, was only one-quarter Jewish. And it omitted altogether that Hawke believed his true biological father was a German immigrant named Dekker with whom his mother had had an affair. Either way, Hawke knew he wouldn't have been considered Jewish even under Hitler's classification. As Hawke wrote in his application for a change of identity: "I have always responded to a different name and I wish to formalize my name prior to attending college in the fall as to avoid confusion."[1]
The article couldn't have come at a worse time. For the past few months, the Knights of Freedom had begun to attract attacks from other white-power groups. So
me, jealous of Hawke's Internet skills, had taken to calling him the "Net Nazi" and were claiming that the KOF was a virtual movement with no real world presence. Others, suspicious of the KOF's quick rise into the limelight, posted mocking replies to his messages in online newsgroups. To Hawke's detractors, the falsehoods about his Jewish ancestry would provide delicious irony and damaging ammunition.
Indeed, the insults about him being a "Kosher Nazi" had already begun. Tom Metzger, head of the White Aryan Resistance—the same Tom Metzger whose name Hawke had placed in the hidden "MetaTag" code at KOF.net to bring in traffic from search engines—was quoted in the Herald-Journal article as saying, "If he is a Jew, he will have no stature left. People he is involved with will have nothing to do with him."
When the article appeared, part of Hawke was mortified that everything he had built was about to collapse. But he tried to stay cool-headed. He contemplated his damage-control options. He wouldn't say anything about the article to people in the Knights of Freedom unless they asked. And if they did, he'd remind them that the whole matter was a creation of the Jewish-controlled media or an effort by the Zionist Occupied Government, as he liked to refer to the controlling powers in the U.S., designed to undermine proud Aryan people. Bottom line, any publicity is good publicity, Hawke would tell his followers.
Fortunately for Hawke, people at Wofford were focused more on Hawke's message than on the revelations about him as a messenger. To his relief, he inspired fear, not laughter. Wofford professors abandoned their syllabi that day and instead devoted their classes to discussing the Knights of Freedom web site and the group's leader. Then, in the evening, around 300 Wofford students—nearly a third of the student body—gathered in the college's auditorium to hold a candlelight vigil to show their opposition to racism and bigotry.
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