If you have discovered that strange appointments and reminders are appearing in your iPhone’s Calendar app, you may be worried that you are infected with an iPhone calendar virus or your iPhone calendar has been hacked. What’s more likely is that you’re subscribed to a third-party calendar, which leads to annoying spam appointments.
This kind of calendar is becoming prolific, with more and more cases happening, so you’re definitely not the only one seeing these annoying appointments pop up on your iPhone – in fact, igamesnews staff have been affected by this phenomenon too irritant.
Fortunately, iPhone Calendar spam is not dangerous and should be easy to get rid of. It’s not an iPhone calendar virus, but it certainly looks like a virus when a bunch of strange appointments appear on your iPhone. (If you’re worried you might have a virus, read: How to Remove a Virus from an iPhone or iPad for tips.)
Here’s how to stop iPhone Calendar spam on your iPhone – and how to avoid falling prey to this type of attack.
Unfortunately, because Apple products are so interconnected, if you get spam in your iPhone’s Calendar, it’s inevitable that it will show up on all your other Apple devices as well. The tips presented here should help you deal with Calendar spam on your iPhone, iPad, Mac, and everywhere else.
How the “iPhone Calendar Virus” Got on Your iPhone
The usual path to your iPhone is to send emails and text messages containing event invitations in the form of an .ics file. Even if you decline them, this can give hackers the opportunity to send more invitations to your calendar, which can have disastrous consequences.
Rule number one: never click on links or other active sections of appointments. If you can, just delete the event as usual, but chances are you’ll also need to unsubscribe from the calendar, which we’ll cover in the next section.
We received a message arriving via Messages via an iCloud address. Luckily, we didn’t open the message, but that’s how it appeared – and since the message went to the Messages app, it appears on all of our Apple products, which is a bit annoying!
Others have received DHL spam asking them to track a package and providing a link. Of course, as soon as people click the link, they end up subscribing to a calendar that fills their iPhone with appointments for things like critical threats and other warnings.
We’ve also heard from friends and family concerned about appointments alerting them to the need to protect their devices. For example, they might see a message: “Your iPhone may not be protected!” Click to protect it! message. A link follows the message – under no circumstances should you click on the link!
What to do if you receive spam from iPhone calendar
The best advice for any text or email of this type is to treat it as you would phishing emails, which attempt to trick you into disclosing personal data. Do not interact with appointments in any way except to delete them.
If the appointment arrived via SMS in the Messages app, to delete it you need to swipe from right to left and choose Delete. Your iPhone may then offer to report spam, which we suggest you do.
Then follow the following steps.
How to Delete Spam Calendar Events on iPhone
If a multitude of appointments suddenly appear on your iPhone, what can you do? How can you get rid of iPhone calendar spam?
One way is to follow these steps:
- Open the Apple Calendar app.
- Tap Calendars at the bottom of the page.
- Look for those you don’t recognize. Once you locate it, tap the red circle with an “i” inside it to open the information panel.
- Finally, scroll to the bottom of the panel until you find the Delete calendar option. Select this and hopefully this will put an end to the unwanted invitations.
If this doesn’t resolve the issue, move on to the next step…
How to Stop Calendar Spam on iPhone
If you continue to receive spam invitations, the problematic calendar may have a subscription set up on your iPhone. Removing this is simple.
- Open Settings.
- Select Calendar > Accounts.
- Find the Subscribed Calendars option and tap it.
- Find the calendars you don’t want, then select them and tap the Delete Account option.
This should be all you need to do to prevent malicious appointments and reminders from appearing on your calendar.
For more ways to get organized, check out our guide to the best productivity apps.
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