WARNING! New Calendar Scam!

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Phishing scams are increasing in frequency and sophistication these days and more and more people fall victim to them each and every day. New twists on older phishing scams are emerging and I want to talk to you today about one of those and how best to avoid them.

It really does make me angry at how people are taken advantage of by these types of scams and so I want to try and help put a stop at that today. Even if it’s just one person who was able to avoid this, it’s still one person who was not able to fall victim to it. So what is this new phishing scam? Read on to find out.

Calendar Invites

Now this might seem a bit odd, but it appears that online calendars are the latest application to fall victim of being used by phishing scammers. How is this possible? Well I’ll explain and it also appears that most online calendars are not safe from this.

What they do is they’ll use the calendar’s regular or default settings in order to set fake events or reminders that will have a lot of links that are not legitimate and will try to steal your information. Microsoft Outlook, the Google Calendar and other online calendars are all vulnerable to this.

Hacker

If you’re one who uses a calendar frequently and constantly checks up on it to see what you might have scheduled on any particular day, you’ll definitely want to pay close attention to this. You might happen to check it one day and see an unusual event that you don’t remember adding or even accepting and so you might be curious to click on the link to see what it is all about. DON’T CLICK IT! It is a fake website that is trying to get login as well as other valuable information from you. The scammers could also use that link to download malware onto your computer.

What to Look Out For

If this new phishing scam has you worried, there’s a simple way to avoid. When you’re checking your calendar and you see something that you don’t recognize or don’t remember setting, odds are it is a phishing scam so do not click on any of those links.

Don’t hesitate to contact someone if you need to confirm whether an event was set on a specific date of if there was a link included with it. There’s just too many ways out there for people to get ahold of your critical and personal information and it really is sad that scammers resort to these things, but what I just mentioned above is definitely a great way to protect yourself from what the scammers are doing today.

You can always change the settings in your calendar if you need to as this is another great way to help keep the scammers from trying to target you. Outlook and other calendar programs might even have a way to make it password protected so I would look under settings to make sure that’s possible. If you do the things I mentioned, you can prevent yourself from become a victim of this calendar scam.