Why am i receiving spam calendar invites via calendar app?

It sounds like I received the same spam event as you ($19.99 Rayban Sunglasses!).

I trolled some other forums and found a workaround that worked pretty simply for me, but I did it from my iMac signed into the same iCloud calendar as my iPhone that had the spam event.

I created a new calendar, put the spam event into the new calendar, and then deleted the new calendar. An option will pop up asking whether or not to "delete it without notifying", or "delete with notification". Choose DELETE WITHOUT NOTIFYING (as notifying confirms your email address to the spam trolls and presumably you will receive these all the time).

You can do the same exact workaround through your iPhone's iCal as well.

Some of these steps might not be necessary but here we go:

Open Calendar.

If the Calendar List pane is not already showing, go to the view menu and select "Show Calendar List".

Right click in a blank area of that Calendar list pane and select "New Calendar". You don't have to bother giving it a name; for this "Untitled" will work just fine.

In the calendar pane, select the discount sunglass event. Right click it and select the "calendar" submenu then in the list of Calendars you have, select the new calendar you just created. That switches the event to the new calendar.

Back in the Calendar list pane, right-click on the new calendar you created and select "Delete". You will get a confirmation pane asking if you want to delete the calendar plus all its events; you do. You MAY also get another (or maybe it was combined into one confirmation; sorry I don't remember) confirmation window asking if you want to notify the sunglass event creator; you don't.

Thats it.

Dear Apple,

I complete agree with my precursor. I received a spam invitation as well (on my apple ID-mail-adress!) and can't even delete the event, since it is locked! And I don't want to decline the event, since that will confirm the validity of my mail-adress.

- Please consider implementing a feature to block calender invitations from people/users, that are not on our contact lists.

- Please consider implementing a feature that we do not receive locked invitations!

Thank you!

iPhone 5S, iOS 9.3.5

It's really not that mysterious. It's just another form of spamming. Anyone with a calendar app who knows your email address can send you a calendar invite. Presumably there are "bots" which can do this in bulk. It's no good calling on Apple to do anything about it here - this is a user-to-user forum, not a place to communicate with Apple. You need to use the Feedback facility which they provide http://www.apple.com/contact/feedback.html

As far as I can see the only way to stop this would be to introduce a setting whereby only your contacts can send you calendar invites.

I received this too, a few days ago. How did this happen?

This problem first appeared in iOS 10, because of a big error by Apple programmers.

Do not decline the invitation! If you select it and choose "decline", the spammer will know he’s got a live victim. You will see an alert that says:

If you decline this event, the originator will be notified. You can view declined events by choosing Show Declined Events from the View menu. You can’t undo this action.

Apple gives us no way to delete it without notification, so we need to use a trick. This appears to be the only way to delete it without sending an acknowledgement:

1 Make a new calendar.

2 Move the ad to the new calendar.

3 Delete the new calendar.

You will be presented with the option to delete it without informing the SPAMMER.

To keep this from happening again, fix the error in your mobile devices (iPhone and iPad). Go to Settings -> Calendar and turn off Events Found in Apps. (That's the mistake made by Apple programmers.)

More here:https://9to5mac.com/2016/11/09/icloud-photo-sharing-and-calendar-spam/

Unfortunately, Apple has no solution yet to the iPhoto sharing error.

Efhunter wrote:

Dear Apple,

I'm about to go buy a samsung galaxy to end all my complaints with this iphone. You have done very little right since ios 6.

Buy a Samsung phone if that will satisfy you.

This is not just an issue with iPhone users. I have never owned an iPhone in my life (or any other iOS device for that matter) and woke up to this same spam notification in iCal on my MBP. I will also add that none of my calendars are public in any way, shape or form and I have never subscribed to anyone else's calendar. I wish I had thought to do what Brent_k did instead of clicking decline.

MBP Mid-2012, macOS Sierra 10.12.1

Wow, this is a huge problem! I too have just received spam invites from 30700700.com that total two per day and completely take over all of my calendar, and continue indefinitely. The workaround would take eons, moving each event and then deleting.

Please get on this quickly, Apple.

Al Hatch wrote:

More here:https://9to5mac.com/2016/11/09/icloud-photo-sharing-and-calendar-spam/

Unfortunately, Apple has no solution yet to the iPhoto sharing error.

Settings/iCloud. Tap on Photos. Turn off iCloud Photo Sharing.

I don't use iPhoto sharing, so my comment only relates to the iCalendar issue.
There are two parts to this problem:

1. Preventing new spam invitations from arriving and
2. Dealing with the invitations that have already been received.

1. In terms of prevention, when I went to the Apple Store to check with them a few weeks ago, they hadn't yet heard of this happening. They suggested I go to Settings>Calendar> and toggle off the last item on the list "Events found in Apps" assuming the invites were coming from an email account - which they aren't we know now. The spam kept coming and piling up on my calendar so I unsynced that calendar on my phone and computer from iCloud, but my iCloud account kept receiving invites which I could see piling up when I logged onto iCloud.com.

However, I found an additional fix here: http://1wayswim.com/blog/2016/11/23/how-to-stop-icloud-calendar-spam It involves logging onto your online iCloud account and changing settings there that are apparently not available on the phone or OS apps. Hopefully this will work although I don't know if there's any chance that deleting the emails will result in notification of the sender.

2. The second problem continues to be tricky for me. Based on this and other threads, there seem to be two groups of spammers - the Ray Ban crew, and the numbers and characters (the latter is the spam I'm getting). The Ray Ban spam seems to be for single day events, while the spam I'm getting, is a two day event that repeats every two days with no end date - filling up my entire calendar into the future. The suggested fix of moving the [infinite number of] events into another calendar, and then deleting that calendar without notifying the sender of the outstanding events, is not a practical solution in my case. I suppose I could just delete or not use the calendar that gets that spam, but that seems like a poor solution as well. The folks at the Apple Store said they couldn't imagine why rejecting the invite would be a problem, which seemed a bit naive to me, but I don't claim to be an expert. I'm still holding out on that one.

Just received a very similar message today from a name with Chinese characters for a Black Friday Michael Kors sale. Terrible sales tactic if its real but in the meantime we really need a security fix for this.

! Im sure these messages have given spammers hundreds if not thousands of valid Apple user email addresses to abuse for the foreseeable future.

I experienced this issue after using an online scheduling application to sign up for an interview time with a recruiter. Using the "Add to Calendar" function on this website caused a calendar subscription to be created in Calendar.

To delete this subscription and stop invites, navigate to Settings > Calendar > Subscribed Calendars. Click into the subscription to remove it. This stops all invites moving forward.

That is entirely your choice, the option exists at your end to have them delivered by email or in-app, I would choose delivery to email rather than in-app. Either way email is the delivery method, if not the final location.