Fake meeting invites are landing on calendars. Here’s how to clear them out
Updated: Sep 1
Someone puts a bill or a meeting on your calendar that you never agreed to. You delete it, and it’s back the next day. Here’s what it is, and the one setting that stops it
The ServiceByte Support Team
THE SHORT VERSION
Scammers are sending calendar invites in bulk. Most of them mention a payment.
Don’t click, don’t call, don’t reply. Even a Decline tells them your address is real.
Calling them isn’t harmless, even if you give nothing away. The call itself is what they wanted.
Delete the event, then turn off the setting that adds invites automatically.
If it keeps coming back, the calendar behind it is still subscribed. Remove that too.
What’s happening
Your calendar is built to be helpful. When someone emails you an invite, most calendar apps put it on your schedule right away so you don’t miss it. Scammers found that open door and walked in.
They send these out by the thousand, and the invite itself is the message. A bill you don’t owe. A renewal you never signed up for. A meeting about a charge on your account. There’s usually a phone number, and it’s always urgent.
Landing on your calendar is only step one. The point is to get you on the phone, where someone friendly talks you into installing software that hands over your computer, paying for something you don’t need, or reading out your bank details.
Signs an invite isn’t real
You don’t remember agreeing to it, and nobody you know is on it.
It’s about money. An invoice, a refund, a renewal, a bonus payout.
It wants you to hurry. Today, right now, before the account closes.
It gives you a phone number instead of a person you already deal with.
The organizer’s email address isn’t one you recognize.
The same event repeats day after day.
First, don’t answer it
Don’t tap the link. Don’t call the number. Don’t press Decline or Maybe either.
Any reply confirms a real person read it, and that moves your address onto a more valuable list. More invites follow. Just delete it, and if your calendar offers the choice, pick Do not send a response.
Calling them costs you, even if you hang up
One of our customers called the number on one of these invites this week. She stopped before letting anyone onto her computer and called us instead. That was the right instinct, and it saved her a very bad afternoon. Her phone number is still worth more to that operation today than it was a week ago.
That part surprises people. A lot of us, seniors especially, think there’s no harm in ringing up to waste a scammer’s time. We understand the appeal. The trouble is that the call itself is the information they were fishing for, and you hand it over in the first few seconds, before you’ve said anything you’d call sensitive.
GOOD TO KNOW
What one phone call hands over
A live number with a real person on it. Most of the numbers they dial go nowhere. Yours now goes somewhere, so it moves to a shorter and far more valuable list.
A recording of your voice. Every call is recorded on their end. Voice clips get used to build a copy of your voice, or replayed to a bank, a family member or a help desk.
Small details about you. Your name, roughly where you live, roughly your age, whether you sound like you’re home alone. The friendly small talk is the interview.
Which story got you to pick up the phone. The next attempt is tailored, and it comes from someone claiming to be your bank, your grandchild, or us.
Proof that you engage. That’s the whole product. Numbers that answer and talk get sold between groups and called for years.
So don’t ring them to tell them off, and don’t ring them to string them along. Wasting a few minutes of their day costs them almost nothing, and it puts your name in front of the next twenty people who buy that list. Delete the invite, block the number and let your line go quiet. Silence is the only answer they can’t use.
If you already called them
Tell us even if you gave them nothing and hung up after ten seconds. There’s no cleanup to do on the computer in that case, but we’ll note the number, warn the rest of your household or your team, and tell you what the follow up calls are likely to sound like. Expect more of them for a while.
If they got as far as your screen, disconnect from the internet and call us. Don’t wait to see what happens. We’ll check what got installed, change the passwords that matter and tell you whether your bank needs a call too. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about. These are built to catch busy people on a normal day.
Clear it out, then close the door
Three things to do. The wording’s a little different in Outlook, Google, Apple and Android, but the settings sit in the same sort of place in all of them.
Delete the event quietly
Remove it without replying. If your calendar offers the option not to send a response, take it. Then report the sender as junk, so your email provider learns from it.
Change one setting
Open your calendar settings and find the option about adding invitations. Set it so invites only appear when they’re from someone you know, or only once you’ve accepted them.
Check your calendar list
The same settings area lists every calendar feeding into yours. Remove any you didn’t add yourself, and check which apps have permission to write to it.
Not sure where those settings live on your device?
Email [email protected] and we’ll point you straight to them.
If it keeps coming back
Your calendar usually lives in more than one place at once. Your phone, your laptop, your webmail. Delete an event on one of them and a copy sitting on another can quietly put it back.
So remove it everywhere you can see it, not just on the device in front of you. Then find the calendar it arrived on, usually listed under Subscribed Calendars or Other calendars, and unsubscribe. Deleting one event stops one event. Removing the subscription stops the next hundred.
Stop the next wave
Turn off auto-add
Invites should sit in your email until you decide to accept them.
Limit who can add
Only people and apps you trust need permission to put things on your calendar.
Tidy shared calendars
Remove public or anonymous access, and limit who can create or edit events.1
Use two-step sign-in
Also called MFA. If someone gets your password, they still can’t use your account to send invites.
Keep protection current
Security software with web filtering blocks the bad links before anyone reaches them.
Don’t engage
No clicking, no calling, no replying. Delete it and get on with your day.
One note for business owners
If one person on your team is getting these, others probably are too. They just haven’t looked. Shared calendars and meeting-room calendars are a favorite target, because anyone can often write to them. It’s worth a check across the whole company, not just the mailbox that spoke up.
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