Apple iPhones Hit With Calendar Spam Touting Cheap Designer Goods

Users of Apple iPhones may have noticed increasing amounts of unwanted event invitations within their iCloud calendars promoting discounts on designer goods – but despite this apparent spam Apple is silent.

The calendar invitations on iPhones are usually made up of discount offers on designer goods such as sunglasses, but the spam comes from spammers rather than the brand manufacturers themselves.

The issue has become particularly noticable in the run up to the Black Friday sales event last week, and was highlighted by technology writer David Sparks, who has offered a way for iPhone users to deal with the issue.

Spam Invites

“Most of the calendar spam I’ve seen has originated from China,” blogged Sparks. “Somebody has a big list of email addresses and sends out calendar invites with spammy links embedded. By default, the Mac looks at these invites and gives them to you via the calendar app along with a notification.”

Sparks meanwhile suggests the following steps to dealing with the influx of unwanted invites, which involves creating a special calendar specifically for the spam (called Spam for example) or moving the notifications to arrive in email form, which can then be deleted without the sender knowing.

Sparks advised iPhone users to never accept or decline an invitation, as it lets the spammers know there is a human at the other end of that email and encourages them to send even more. But he said that Apple needs to action on this matter, and called for the iPad maker to intervene.

“Like I said, Apple needs to give us a better way to deal with this,” he wrote.

Silicon UK contacted Apple but received no reply at the time of writing.

Battery Drain

Earlier this week Apple users began complaining that the latest version of iOS 10 is wreaking havoc with the battery life of their iPhones.

Multiple users claimed their battery life was compromised with the new update, with one user noting it took mere seconds for the battery to drop from 30 percent to one percent before the device shuts down.

Prior to that an irritating memory bug in Apple’s iOS operating system was uncovered by pranksters who used a seemingly innocent video to crash iPhones.

If the .mp4 video was played in the iPhone’s video player, it causes the iPhone to slow to a crawl and eventually freeze altogether, forcing a hard reset.

Quiz: How well do you know Apple?