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WTF is going on with my phone's calendar? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
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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...

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[–] 50 points 1 year ago (14 children)

This has been going on for years.

Scammers can send calendar invitations to anybody. Google helpfully adds them to your calendar automatically. And you often don't get the invitation in email, since it gets added directly to your calendar.

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  • [–] 27 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I work in IT and we have been seeing an uptick in these types of attacks.

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  • [–] 17 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago

    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.

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Can confirm, this was happening to me over 8 years ago. I just ended up disabling the Google Calendar app. I still know how to use pen and paper...

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  • [–] [S] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

    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...

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  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] [S] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year 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.

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    • [–] 19 points 1 year ago

    I helped a friend with this earlier this evening (literally the McAfee one).

    G Calendar (desktop, not sure about the app) > ⚙️ Settings > Event Settings on the left > "Add invitations to my calendar" switch that to either of the other options.

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    [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Read this

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    • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I've got some kind of mal-ware on my phone...

    I think that's what it is. I used to use an app called adaware to clean up people's phones when I worked at Verizon. Might be worth running that and removing any threats. Probably a free shitty app that you downloaded.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 1 year ago

    yeah, but I haven't downloaded or installed anything for years. I can't stand staring at these tiny screens for very long, and for me, most internet surfing on mobile is an exercise in frustration. Aside from the maps and a crossword puzzle app I've had for years, all I use it for is the phone, texts, and sometimes work emails and IM's, and of course the calendar, which I rely on quite a bit. Mostly, tho, I live behind a desktop PC.

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