Pajama Entrepreneur

Phishers are active on Google Calendar. I opened my Calendar today to find an entry purporting to be from Google Customer Care. It read:

“THIS Email is from Gmail Customer Care and we are sending it to every Gmail Email User Accounts Owner for safety. we are having congestions due to the anonymous registration of Gmail accounts so we are shutting down some Gmail accounts and your account was among those to be deleted.We are sending you this email so that you can verify and let us know if you still want to use this account.If you are still interested please confirm your account by filling the space below.Your User name,password,date of birth and your country information would be needed to verify your account. Due to the congestion in all Gmail users and removal of all unused Gmail Accounts, Gmail would be shutting down all unused Accounts, You will have to confirm your E-mail by filling out your Login Information below after clicking the reply button, or your account will be suspended within 24 hours for security reasons.”

I immediately knew this was a phishing attempt so I sent an email to Google to alert them of what’s happening. Then, I went to the Calendar settings and changed it. Here’s what you do so that you don’t receive these event “invitations”:

• Go to your Google Calendar and click on Settings (upper right hand corner)
• Click on the General Tab
• Scroll to the bottom of the page and you will see a setting called Automatically add invitations to my calendar
• Click on “No, only display invitations to which I have replied”

I had this option on Yes and found out that this is how the phishers managed to put that message in my calendar.