How to stop and delete iPhone calendar spam

Macworld

If you’ve discovered that weird appointments and reminders are appearing in your iPhone’s Calendar app, you may be afraid that you have an iPhone Calendar virus, or that your iPhone Calendar has been hacked. What’s more likely is that you have been subscribed to a third-party calendar, which is generating annoying spam appointments.

This kind of calendar is becoming prolific, with more and more cases, so you are most certainly not alone in seeing these annoying appointments appear on your iPhone – in fact Macworld staff have also been affected by this irritating phenomenon.

Thankfully, iPhone calendar spam is not dangerous and should be easy to get rid of. This isn’t an iPhone Calendar Virus, but it certainly feels like one when a cluster of strange appointments appear on your iPhone. (If you are concerned that you have a virus read: How to remove a virus from an iPhone or iPad for advice.)

Here’s how to stop iPhone calendar spam on your iPhone – and how to avoid falling foul of this sort of attack.

Unfortunately, because Apple’s products are so interlinked, if you get spam in your iPhone calendar it’s inevitable that it will also turn up on all your other Apple devices. The tips here should help you deal with the Calendar spam on your iPhone, iPad, Mac and anywhere else.

How the ‘iPhone calendar virus’ got on your iPhone

The usual route to your iPhone is through emails and text messages that include invites to events in the form of an.ics file. Even if you decline them, this can leave an opening for hackers to send more invites to your calendar, which can lead to disastrous consequences.

Number-one rule: never click on any links or other active sections of the appointments. If you can, simply delete the event as normal, but the chances are you’ll need to unsubscribe from the calendar as well, which we cover in the next section.

We received a message that came in via Messages via an iCloud address. Luckily we didn’t open the message, but this is how it appeared – and because the message went to the Messages app it’s on all our Apple products, which is a tad annoying!  

Others have received a DHL spam text asking them to track a parcel and providing a link. Of course, as soon as people click on the link they end up subscribing to a calendar that fills their iPhone with appointments for things like critical threats and other warnings.

We have also heard from friends and family concerned about appointments alerting them to the need to protect their devices. For example, they might see a: “Your iPhone might 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 get iPhone Calendar spam

The best advice for any text or email like that is to treat it as you would phishing emails, which try to trick you into giving away personal data. Don’t interact with the appointments in any way, other than to delete them.

If the appointment arrived via a text in the Messages app to delete it you should swipe from right to left and choose Delete. Your iPhone may then offer to Report Junk, which we suggest you do.

Then follow the next steps.

How delete spam calendar events on iPhone

If a load of appointments have suddenly arrived on your iPhone what can you do? How can you get rid of the 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 any that you don’t recognise. Once you’ve located it, tap the red circle with an ‘i’ inside to open up the information panel.

Finally, scroll down to the bottom of the panel until you find the Delete Calendar option. Select this and hopefully that will put an end to the unwanted invites.

If that doesn’t fix the problem, move onto the next step…

How to stop calendar spam on iPhone

If you continue to receive spam invites, then it could be that the troublesome calendar has a subscription set up on your iPhone. Removing this is simple.

Open Settings.

Select Calendar > Accounts.

Look for the Subscribed Calendars option and tap it.

Find any calendars that you don’t want, then select them and tap the Delete Account option.

This should be all you need to do to stop the rogue appointments and reminders from appearing on your calendar.

For more ways to get organized, check out our guide to the best productivity apps.

iOS, iPhone, Personal Software, Security Software and Services