Spam and Scam on Google Calendar

over 5 years ago

When I opened my email this morning, I found a Google Calendar Notification that read like this:

Notification №6538 CONGRATULATIONS!
🚩 Your e-mail address is the winner of our annual competition! Your prize money is $1134. Follow the instructions on the website to get it (followed by a link)

So I took the text and did a Google Search and found just these past few days lots of people had reported this on the Google Forum. Digging through lots of Forum treads I finally found one that was useful, and it had the link to this Lifehacker.com article:

How to Keep Spam Out of Your Google Calendar

^{Source: https://lifehacker.com/}

The instructions in this article read as follows:

Thankfully, a few changes to Google Calendar’s default settings can help keep block these auto-add phishing scams from making their way into your events list:

Open Google Calendar on your desktop, as the first setting you’ll adjust isn’t accessible from the mobile version.
Click the cog-shaped settings icon, then click Settings.
Go to the “Event Settings” tab.
Find the option “Automatically add invitations” and click the drop-down menu.
Select “No, only show invitations to which I’ve responded.” This will prevent event invites you haven’t accepted or declined from showing up on your calendar(s).
Next, go to the “View Options” tab
Make sure the box next to “Show declined events” is unchecked. That will remove any declined event from your calendar.
Finally, look for the “Events from Gmail” section, and uncheck
“Automatically add events from Gmail to my calendar.”
After you’ve made these changes on the desktop version, you should double check that declined events won’t show up on mobile, too:

Open the Google Calendar app
Tap the “hamburger” icon to open the side menu
Scroll down and tap “Settings”
Tap “General”
Disable the slider next to “Show declined events.”

Finally, since these scam events are often sent via mass email invites, it’s helpful to flag and report suspicious emails or invites you receive to Google.

Apparently, according to this article, this has been going on for a long time, a link provided is this, from over 10 years ago:
Keep Spammers Out of Your Google Calendar

I hope passing on this information is of use to you, and perhaps you had also gotten a Calendar message as this one described. So follow the instructions given by Lifehacker (I did) to clear this up!