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…

  • tipicaldik@lemmy.worldOP
    6·
    3 days ago

    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…

    • actionjbone@sh.itjust.works
      19·
      3 days ago

      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.

      • tipicaldik@lemmy.worldOP
        6·
        3 days ago

        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.

        • actionjbone@sh.itjust.works
          7·
          3 days ago

          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.

    • LemmyKnowsBest@lemmy.world
      9·
      3 days ago

      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.