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…
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.