Junk mail, spam email, robocalls, and now…spam Google calendar events.
I had the delightful experience of getting some of this spam about 2 weeks ago. Basically I just saw a repeating event for “Win a new iPhone” every day at 6-9pm that endlessly repeated.
While this is definitely an annoying thing to have happen, resist the urge to click the link(s) included in these invites. This is a textbook way to get redirected to a site that could be trying to spread malware or a phishing attempt to gain access to usernames, passwords, or other sensitive data.
Google is aware of this relatively new spam problem, though, and has supplied detailed instructions on how to report these events as spam on your computer (unfortunately you can’t do this via mobile apps or browsers. This will also automatically remove the event from your calendar.
After you report it as spam, there are a couple of ways that you can keep spammers from adding events to your calendar in the future:
Turn off “automatically add invitations”:
- Go to Google Calendar on your computer
- At the top right, click on the gear icon and then “Settings”
- On the left side of the page, find the “General” tab, click “Event settings”
- Find the options labeled “Automatically add invitations” and set to “No, only show invitations to which I have responded.
Another way to add spam events to your calendar is for a spammer to send an email to your Gmail address. You can also turn this feature off, though.
Turn off Events from Gmail:
- Go to Google Calendar (again on your computer).
- Click on the gear icon in the top right, and then click “Settings”
- On the left side, click the “Events from Gmail” text.
- Uncheck the box that says “Automatically add events from Gmail to my calendar
Remember that if you get one of these events, you need to mark it as spam! Doing this will remove it from your calendar and give Google more information to keep this from happening in the future.
No matter what the text in the calendar even says remember to never click on any of these links.
Hopefully, Google finds a solution to this problem sooner rather than later!
