If you’ve been seeing Google Meet invitations and shared Google Drive items from people you don’t know, only to have them try to sell you something or extort personal information, you’re not alone. For the last few weeks some Google users have been getting new invitations for meetings and shared Drive items that inevitably turn into the same kind of annoying crap you’re used to seeing in an email spam filter.
Exactly what prompted the flood of spam isn’t clear; it might just be that some of the spam networks discovered a new vector after being flummoxed by consumers’ increasingly accurate BS detection on other platforms. What makes it especially frustrating is that there’s no easy way to avoid them if you’re a regular user of Meet or Drive.
While you can unsubscribe from invitations to shared Google Drive items, and you can use standard email filters to stop seeing both of them pop up in your inbox, separating these bogus messages from legitimate Meet and Drive emails is basically impossible. Since the emails come from a generic Google address, there’s no way to adapt based on the sender.
Google has proven adept at dealing with spam in the past, as evidenced by its filters in Gmail and its Call Screen feature in the Android dialer. Hopefully it can get a handle on these spam exploits; it should certainly be motivated to do so, since the company is heavily pushing its suite of work tools at the moment.
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