Do you use Google Calendar? Are you an Android user? If your answer to both questions is "yes", then you may want to keep reading.

A couple months ago, my Google Calendar became completely flooded with events that were obviously created by Russian phishing scammers. There is one for every hour of every day, which effectively buries most of my actual Calendar events. I first noticed it on my Samsung Galaxy S10; it looks like this now:



So I immediately began looking into how it happened. It didn't take long to realize that I'm not the only one; countless thousands (millions, perhaps?) of others have been affected. And the reason? Get this: Google has a default security setting on the desktop version of Calendar that automatically displays calendar invitations from anyone who has your email/username, whether you have accepted the invitations or not. Those invitations then sync to your other devices. Stupid default, am I right? Anyway, you can change this setting from your desktop, and I highly recommend you do it right away:

1. Go to https://calendar.google.com/
2. Click the 'Settings' gear icon
3. In the menu that appears to the left, click 'Event settings'
4. You will see a setting called 'Automatically add invitations'. The default setting for this is 'Yes'; change it to 'No, only show invitations to which I have responded'.

What about changing the settings on your Android device, you ask? Sorry, you're out of luck - no such setting/option currently exists in the Android versions of the Google Calendar app, so it is impossible to remove these invitations, or at least stop them from displaying. Google has been aware of the problem for at least a year, as far as I can tell, but they have still not developed a fix for it.

So, to make a long story short, if you don't want your Google Calendar app to one day look like mine (and be effectively useless), then you have to make the setting change in the desktop version before it happens and then syncs everything to your Android app. It's too late for me, but hopefully my experience can help you.

That seems like a pretty glaring flaw that they should have already fixed. Fortunately I'm using an iPhone but wow Google!

Google sucks. I avoid them. Some benefit to using a gmail account for phone set up that I have never used. Don't know or don't care if it gets email. I use an Android phone, true and a tiny iPhone and Google has some hooks in me, but I don't use their apps.

Thanks Guns4Lib. Got it done. I haven't had that problem, yet. I don't think I even use the calendar feature but I have seen some pop up on there once or twice that was a date from an email I got but didn't want to schedule anything.

But glad you brought that to my attention. Yes, my setting was set to accept invitations. I now have it changed to No.

Thanks.

Typical Google. Probably have finally fixed it but nice reminder to everyone to check the stupid settings regularly. Facebook was doing similar crap like this as well. Setting defaults to accept where any security minded would have said no, unless I want to.

Sounds fishy...






Glad you got it fixed, thanks for sharing both the problem, and solution