How to stop Google Calendar spam

About a week ago I got a very strange notification on my phone. It was in Russian and it went as follows:

 ⚡ ВАМ ДОСТУПЕН ДЕНЕЖНЫЙ ПЕРЕВОД ⚡ Перевод подготовлен к отправке на Ваши реквизиты. ВАШ ПЕРЕВОД ➡ ✅ https://t.co/76…

According to Google translate, it regards a financial trasnaction that awaits me in the URL. For the love of the internet I did not click that link.

Just delete it

No good. I tried deleting it, but it kept coming back.

Another option tried was to “Mark as spam” but that is no good either, as the send keeps using new addresses to generate the mass invite.

Solution

I have written a small script that loops through all my future Google Calendar events. If an event contains the wording from the spam message it gets deleted. That’s it.

I run this script every hour and not spam seen ever since.

Can I try it?

Be my guest. The code snippet appears below. Feel free to use it and support the git. Let me also add a link to my Google script project so you can simply duplicate to yours.

More things

I would also recommend checking out alternative solutions such as Brian Fritton’s “Zapier” solution”.

Google are well aware of the issue as clearly stated in this Google Claendar help post dated Sep 3rd, 2019. Google’s support suggest you opt the setting that says “Only show invitation to which I have responded“.

I however agree with @Jonas Jakobsen commenting that “The consequence is that whoever you shared your calendar with, see’s the spammy invites while you don’t”.