Somewhat of a long post so scroll down to
Resolution if you just want a quick fix.
Context: I purchased a new Galaxy Nexus from Google just a few days ago. I wanted a "pure" android experience w/o the telco carrier and all their bloatware and os upgrade delays.
When I received the phone I immediately synced my gmail accounts and apps from the google cloud and installed Lookout premium, avast! mobile security, Ad Network Detector (from Lookout), Carrier IQ (Lookout), and DroidDream cleaner (Lookout). So, I feel that the essential basic security is sound and everything has always checked out clean with no viruses, etc.
I don't have skype, I don't chat, don't use facebook or any other social network, no IM apps, no VOIP -- none of that stuff.
How they got my email address to begin with is unknown. Then again, someone probably just sold it to them.
Issue: Within a few hours of having this new phone I received an unsolicited Google Talk chat invite from
bendyplumz8@gmail.com. WT? (Gee, I wonder what this is about?) Imagine my surprise and disbelief that someone/something was suddenly spamming my hours old new phone/email through Google (and it wasn't happening before with my Galaxy S from the carrier).
I dismissed it from the notification bar.
Today I received this same spam invite and was in front of the computer to do some research on it and that's when I found this forum. Thanks for the posts and here's my contribution.
Resolution: I have always had my chat setting on Invisible and thought that was the least visible/ most discreet setting since one is virtually "invisible". I was wrong. I needed it to be set on "off"!
1. I went into the chat area on the left and clicked "sign out of chat". After this is changed, a link will appear that says "Sign into chat".
2. Next I clicked on the options arrow next to "Chat" and selected "Chat settings" at the bottom.
3. On the Chat Settings page I selected:
Chat: "chat off"
My chat history: "never save chat history"
Auto-add suggested contacts: "Only allow people that I've explicitly approved to chat with me and see when I'm online".
4. I then repeated that for each of my Gmail accounts.
5. On the account that the spam chat invite appeared, an automatic contact had been generated in my contacts so I deleted that contact and scanned for any other rogue entries in my contacts.
So far so good - no idiot spam Chat invites from nefarious strangers have come in.
The disturbing thing to me is that although I was technically signed in to chat (although my setting was on invisible), this spamming never occurred on my previous phone (Galaxy S) as noted above. It had Google talk on it also but I never used it. Hmm, why all of a sudden with a brand new phone from Google did this occur?
