If you’ve noticed that some unknown entities are adding events to your Google Calendar with links that seem pretty suspicious, you’re right to be wary and you should not be clicking on those. But even if you know better than to touch those unsolicited invites, it’s still pretty annoying to have these spam “events” popping up on your calendar. Google has now finally said that they are “aware” of what’s going on and they are working on a fix for this.
If you have not encountered these calendar spammers, you should still be aware that they exist. Since May of this year, a lot of users have been complaining about unknown events suddenly appearing on their Google Calendars. And if you didn’t know that they were spam, you might click on the links included since it normally is about a raffle or a giveaway of some sorts. This is a way for these scammers to get you onto a phishing website.
Google has finally acknowledged in their support forum that they are aware of the “spam occurring in Calendar” and that they are now working on resolving this problem. However, they did not give a specific timeline as to when we can expect this fix which will probably be an update or a patch. They did not, however, give any other update or even tips on how to deal with this except to thank the users for their patience.
Fortunately, the folks at Engadget do have some temporary fixes to protect yourself from the spam events, aside from not clicking on them and deleting them. Go to the Google Calendar website, click on settings and then go to Event Settings. Click on the drop-down menu in “automatically add invitations” and then check the box that says “No, only show invitations to which I have responded.”
You can also click on the “events from Gmail” heading and uncheck “Automatically add events from Gmail to my calendar”. However, these two options limit some of the functionality of Google Calendar so it should be better if Google develops a fix for this.
