If you haven’t experienced the latest iPhone bug, we’re envious. Since early November, a growing number of iPhone users have been receiving spam calendar invites to their iCloud accounts touting deals on Ray-Bans and other brands. Luckily, Apple’s aware of the issue and working on a fix.
“We are sorry that some of our users are receiving spam calendar invitations,” Apple told iMore in an official statement. “We are actively working to address this issue by identifying and blocking suspicious senders and spam in the invites being sent.”
Here’s what’s going on: A spammer sends a calendar invite request which you can either accept, reject, or ignore. Acknowledging the invite in any way confirms to the spammer that your account is active, and may result in even more spam. Ignoring it leaves the invite there on your calendar, as you can see below.
Screengrab via Christina Bonnington
While Apple’s working on a fix, there’s unfortunately no easy workaround to eliminating these spam invites for the time being. What you can do, however, is send these invites to your email rather than directly to your calendar. To do this, head to iCloud.com on your computer, log in, and tap Calendar. Then, tap the Settings gear icon in the bottom left of the screen, then Preferences, and then Advanced. Check the box “Email to [email address]” under “Receive event invitations as:”, and hit save. Now, instead of these invites auto-populating your calendar, you can screen them via email first.
We’ll update this post when Apple has a fix for this issue.