“Scammers Are Targeting Your Calendar—Here’s How to Stay Safe on the Road”
Hey drivers—especially all of you road-warrior women behind the wheel—I want to give you a heads-up on a sneaky scam that’s making its rounds and could hit us truckers hard if we’re not paying attention.
What’s happening
Scammers are hijacking your digital calendar so the alert doesn’t come from an email inbox—it comes right on your schedule.
Here’s how it works:
If they have your email or phone number, they can send a calendar invite or have you subscribe to a spam calendar via a sketchy website.
Then you’ll get a notification like: “Your payment of $500 or whatever is going out today”. That’s exactly what happened to a driver’s wife when an invite showed up referencing a large charge to her account.
Because it comes into a calendar app, people are fooled—“well my phone notified me, so it must be legit.” But it’s not.
Why truckers (especially owner-ops and solo women drivers) need to be extra alert
We’re on the move, sometimes tired, checking our phones in small windows of downtime. It’s easy to tap OK when a calendar alert pops up.
We often have multiple devices—phone, tablet, laptop—and multiple email addresses (dispatch, personal, trucking business). That increases the chances something slips in.
We manage our own finances, run our own business, so a bogus “payment” alert could confuse us or trigger unnecessary panic.
If we click or call a number on the fake alert, we could give scammers access—into our bank, truck business account, or even get hooked into a fake “renewal” or “subscription” they’ll keep billing us for.
What you can do to protect yourself
Dive into your calendar settings (on iOS, Android, computer) and change the default to only accept invites from known senders, or disable automatic calendar subscriptions.
Go through all your calendars and check if there are any you didn’t create—if you find one, hide or delete it.
If you get a calendar notice that looks like a payment or renewal you didn’t authorize, don’t click any link or call any number from it. Instead pause, breathe, and ask: Do I even have an account with that company? Was I expecting this?
Report any such scam alert to the Better Business Bureau (BBB) and your state’s Attorney General.
Keep your devices updated and check which apps have permission to add calendar events. Make sure only trusted apps can do that.
My final word
We’ve got enough to manage without having scammers mess with our calendar while we’re out “doing the miles”. Stay sharp. Keep your devices locked down. And if something pops up that feels off? Trust your gut—because no legitimate company should surprise you that way. Let’s keep it above board, safe, and rolling forward.
