What was originally a scam for Android is now a scam for the other mobile operating system, with iPhone owners targeted by calendar phishing. How do you deal scams masquerading as events?
There’s not enough time in the world to deal with scammers, or even the sheer number of scam attempts they like to try on us all.
It seems there’s a new one every week, or at the very least, an old one revived for a new audience.
For iPhone owners around the world in 2026, that last one appears to be the case, as scammers work their way into phone calendars with a newly rehashed take on the calendar scam.
If you owned an Android from 2019 to 2021, or simply used Google Mail and Google Calendar on your desktop during that time, you might recall this scam: all of a sudden, your calendar could be flooded with invites and events you hadn’t authorised.
The problem is one of mailboxes almost being too clever for their own good, and assuming that any calendar invite attached to an email sent to you is one you’d naturally want to go to. The issue, however, is that an event can also be used for a scam, either as phishing or to simply draw you into a rabbit hole.
Some calendar events turn out to be phishing campaigns, while others turn out to be misinformation, and not everyone will check whether the event on their calendar is actually something they want, and just go.
It’s a problem we saw a few years ago, and now it seems it’s back, with millions of iPhone owners the target.
So what can you do?
Tip 1: Decline, decline, decline
Probably the most obvious tip in the book, if someone has invited you to something you don’t actually want to be a part of, you can simply decline.
Most of the events that have landed on iPhones we’ve seen have been singular, and that makes it really easy to decline. So do that.
Almost like The Simpsons‘ “Just Don’t Look” jingle from Treehouse of Horror VI, just don’t click.
If you get several, they’ll likely be in a series or sequence, and you can say no to all at once, as well.
Tip 2: Check your calendars
Another option is to check your calendars in iPhone settings. Specifically, go into Settings, Apps, and then look for Calendar. In there, you’ll be able to check out which calendars you might have subscribed to, and whether there are some you didn’t intend to subscribe to.
While this is a solid tip for seeing whether you’ve accidentally or inadvertently accepted a scammer’s calendar, it’s less likely.
More likely is that your email address has been leaked a thousand times over, and scammers are simply emailing a bunch of people a calendar entry and hoping some fall for it.
Tip 3: Disable automatic calendar events
But there’s something else you can do:
Go into your calendar app and look for a setting to turn off the automatic calendar event creation.
On Google Calendar for any device, it’s under Calendar’s Settings and “Add invitations to my calendar”, selecting either “only if the sender is known” or “when I respond the invitation”.
Microsoft’s Outlook calendar has its own approach, while folks simply using Apple’s own Calendar app may want to simply turn Siri Suggestions off for the calendar. That may be your main solution.
Tip 4: Block random senders
Alternatively, if you know scammers are emailing your phone, and you know the email address of the scammers, block them. Block the email.
The upside of this approach is it’s quick, but the downside is that scammers can churn through emails pretty quickly, so you may need to do a bit of blocking.
Fortunately, hitting that block button can feel quite good, and may end up seeing you relieve some stress doing so. Block. Block. Block.
@pickrau Is your iPhone seeing random calendar invites all of a sudden? Here are some tips to deal with this scam. #techtok #scams #techtips ♬ original sound – pickrau
