I’m getting events added to my Galaxy phone’s calendar. One was supposed to be an invitation to confirm my $400 order with McAfee, (this happened twice in the last week, and another similar one for a Microsoft service that popped in while I was looking at and deleting the first one. It literally appeared while I was looking at it, and was scheduled for about 3 hours later tonight. I deleted it immediately. Scam emails and text messages I can understand, but how in the hell are they putting this shit in my phones calendar? They have a lot of text in them and links that appear as phone numbers. Has anyone else experienced anything like this? I’m worried I’ve got some kind of mal-ware on my phone…
This has been going on for years.
Scammers can send calendar invitations to anybody. Google helpfully adds them to your calendar automatically. And you often don’t get the invitation in email, since it gets added directly to your calendar.
I work in IT and we have been seeing an uptick in these types of attacks.
And the reason for calendars is because the reminder that an event is starting is usually sent as an email from Google, with the description that has spam links. We’ve been training people to look at the sender to gauge trustworthiness, and with a sender of google.com, people feel like they did due diligence and can trust the contents of the email.
It also plays on that other classic scam tactic - creating urgency.
The victim may not even see the calendar entry until they get a notification “x starts in 1 hour”.
Maybe they’re already in the middle of a busy workday, juggling a bunch of stuff. That calendar popup is just more stress, but it could be important, and they need to find out soon because it’s basically starting!
And so they click.
Can confirm, this was happening to me over 8 years ago. I just ended up disabling the Google Calendar app. I still know how to use pen and paper…
I find that Ctrl+F doesn’t work so well on paper
That’s because you’re not running Arch Linux 🫠
hmm… they reference my personal email addy, which is a yahoo acct I’ve had for decades. It’s associated to my Samsung acct, which I guess I have to assume is how they’re getting to my calendar. My work email (everything, really) is through Google, and I get calendar notifications through them all the time, which I expect. I’ve never seen anything associated with my yahoo acct tho. It’s just weirding me out I’m getting spammed the same way I get notified for a work meeting or a doctors appointment…
*Edit: Adding that I just went in to my app permissions and turned off the Yahoo Mail apps access to Alarms and Reminders. Hopefully they stop…
Keep in mind, nobody is “getting to” your calendar. They don’t have access to it at all.
They simply send an event invitation to your email address. And because you’re invited to a thing, your mail app “helpfully” adds it to your calendar.
They don’t know whether you have a calendar. They just send them to thousands of email addresses hoping that somebody will see them.
Thank you. That clarifies things for me. All this time I’ve been using smartphones and I didn’t know this was a thing. I use my calendar a lot, so I assume for something to appear in it like that, it needs to be put there intentionally. Not gonna lie, but when that last one appeared right before my eyes I got straight-up spooked.
Yeah, I get that. Unless you either read about it, or have worked in a corporate environment with calendars that have events pop up on them without your direct intervention, it’s not something that would be intuitive.
What’s important is that nobody has access to your stuff. They just want you to think they do.
Yes, it really is spam. I got one of those spooky calendar entries once years ago. I’m glad it doesn’t happen more than once or frequently at all. I would really hate that. It’s spam. Report it and/ or ignore it.
Thanks!
If you want, you can also remove the google calendar app if you don’t use it, along with any of the other bloat on there. Seems a bit involved but might be easier then you think.
https://umatechnology.org/how-to-uninstall-any-android-app-with-adb-including-system-apps-and-bloatware-2/
https://technastic.com/google-apps-package-names-play-store/
Google Drive shared folders as well, seeing a lot of those recently and unlike Calendar, you can only block them one at a time.