How to get rid of calendar spam?

[keaide]

Hi there.

I received a spam invitation in my calendar. It has my email address together with several others. This thing seems to just sit there, no clue how it got there. Totally new to me. Need some help there.

(1) How can I get rid of the invitation without notifying the spammer?
(2) How can I block invitations from unknown senders (i.e. not in my contact list)?

Now I found one advice to move the invitation to a new calendar and then just delete that calendar again. Would that work? But then, how to avoid such invitations in the future?

Help is very much appreciated. It feels quite weird to see spam popping up in my calendar...

 

[AlliFlowers]

Have you tried simply deleting it, and when prompted do not notify the inviter?

 

[keaide]

@AlliFlowers: Will I get such prompt by default or do I need to enable that first?

 

[AlliFlowers]

@AlliFlowers: Will I get such prompt by default or do I need to enable that first?

You should get the prompt as soon as you try to delete the event.

 

[keaide]

So... I played around with two iCloud Accounts to see how it works. Here's what I found:
(1) Declining or deleting the invitation does notify the sender automatically (no prompt)
(2) Moving the invitation to a new calendar and then deleting that calendar gives me the option to delete without notifying, but the sender gets a notification anyway.

Any other ideas? Is the iCloud calendar system really that bad?

 

[Lennyvalentin]

I also got a spam event added to my calendar yesterday (buy rayban sunglasses 15% off from some weirdo chinese web outfit that'll probably rip me off with fake merchandise and make fraudulent charges to my CC! Yayyy!). No idea how it happened.

It's unbelievable that strangers can add events to other peoples' calendars willy nilly, and it's equally unbelievable I can't nuke the event without notifying the sender! Unbelievable oversights here all around. I was forced to just let the event expire, which was enormously galling to me.

 

[keaide]

I also got a spam event added to my calendar yesterday (buy rayban sunglasses 15% off from some weirdo chinese web outfit that'll probably rip me off with fake merchandise and make fraudulent charges to my CC! Yayyy!). No idea how it happened.

Confirmed with Apple support: There is no way to delete this invitation without notifying the sender. They recommended to send a screenshot of the invitation to reportphishing@apple.com and abuse@icloud.com (details can be found here: http://www.apple.com/legal/more-resources/phishing/).

So the only solution I came up with was to move the open invitation to a "spam" calendar and hide it...

 

[tw1ll]

And now we have just received a similar looking share invite in Photos - WTF are Apple up to? These F@@@ers are cashing in share options left, right and centre but they are allowing their ecosystem to fall apart. If it gets to the point that I can no longer trust iCloud based apps and/or it gets so spammed as to become unusable then frankly there is zero point staying with Apple Os.

 

[baryon]

I just got a system notification about a calendar event, and whether I want to Accept or Decline it. When I got to Calendar, I see that there's a pending event that's very obviously spam. I see that the list of people this event got sent to are brute-force variations of my email address.

Let's say my email address is johnsmith@icloud.com, this event got sent to jonsmith@icloud.com, johnssmith@icloud.com, johnsmithh@icloud.com, and a dozen similar ones, including mine.

How do I safely remove this event without notifying the spammer that I "Declined" it? I want to avoid them knowing that this email address is valid.

And most importantly, how the hell does this even happen, and how can I prevent this from happening again? Why does my system simply ask me about incoming calendar invitations from strangers? Is there a way to completely block invites (I never use it anyway)? Can I only allow contacts, or even better, "no one"?

Could this be malware? I just ran a BitDefender scan and it came back negative.

Thanks!

 

[Mcmeowmers]

It's not malware. Anyone can iCloud user can do this to another. It's easy to check if a contact is associated with iCloud too. I get this spam too

 

[baryon]

It's not malware. Anyone can iCloud user can do this to another. It's easy to check if a contact is associated with iCloud too. I get this spam too

Any workaround to avoid it? Would disabling my iCloud email address fix it (I don't use it for email anyway)?

I've moved the event to another calendar and then I deleted the calendar, clicking "Delete and don't notify". However, I later read that the spammer gets notified anyway. Apparently Apple is working hand in hand with spammers... How wonderful! Can't wait until my entire calendar gets filled with non-stop bot event invites and I'm going to have to buy a 3rd party calendar app just because I can't disable this stupid "feature"...

Strangely, after this happened, I got a notification by Apple that my iPhone has been removed from my trusted devices, and that if I didn't do this then I should change my password. Then I changed my password and realized that this could have easily been a phishing email... (it wasn't, but I'm stupid for not checking first).

I also went to icloud.com and changed this setting from "in-app notifications" to "email". Not sure if it will help though:



Why isn't there a way to simply not receive event invites? I don't even get what it's for, I have no trouble adding an event manually if it means keeping my privacy.

I just really don't feel like security is something they're taking seriously.

 

[balamw]

MOD NOTE: Please direct any further comments on this topic to this iOS Blog thread https://www.macrumors.com/2016/11/28/delete-icloud-calendar-spam/

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