What Is MASAI School? Why Parents Are Getting Spammed (And How To Stop It)
7:12 a.m. last month, I was wiping crumbs of burnt toast off the kitchen counter when my son Leo’s iPad started buzzing so hard it inched toward the edge of the counter. I grabbed it before it could fall, and looked at the screen: 11 push notifications in the last four minutes, all from something called MASAI School. I’d never heard of it. Leo trundled down the stairs a minute later, backpack half-zipped, and I held up the iPad. “When did you sign up for this coding class thing?” He squinted at the screen, shrugged, and said “Oh, I clicked that link for a free diamond Minecraft skin on TikTok last week. It asked for my phone number to send it, so I put yours. Sorry.”
I laughed it off at first, figured it was a one-off and I’d just unsubscribe. I texted back STOP, deleted the thread, and forgot about it. Three days later, I got another text from a different number: “Your child’s free coding trial is still waiting! Claim your $100 Amazon gift card when you sign up this week.” Then another one two days after that. Then a call to my cell at 2 p.m. on a Wednesday, while I was in the middle of a work meeting. I stepped out to answer, and a sales rep asked for Leo by name, confirmed his age, and asked if we wanted to confirm our free trial for Saturday. I said he never signed up, please remove my number from your list. She kept talking right over me, asking if 10 a.m. or 2 p.m. worked better for the trial. I hung up, and 10 minutes later got a text: “Confirmed! We’ll see Leo for his 10 a.m. trial Saturday.”
I brought it up to the other parents waiting by the bike rack after school that day, and three out of four of them nodded along. One mom said her 9-year-old got her contact info into MASAI after clicking a free Roblox promo link, and she gets three to four texts a week. Another dad said he unsubscribed via email, got added to three more MASAI email lists after that. A 4th grade teacher I know said her whole parent teacher group chat was talking about MASAI the week before, calling it the new spam that just won’t quit.
For people who haven’t run into it yet, MASAI School is a for-profit coding program that targets kids and teens, focused on game design and app development. Their current growth strategy relies almost entirely on partnering with micro kid influencers on TikTok and YouTube to offer free incentives — game skins, gift cards, free merch — that require a contact (usually a parent’s phone or email) to claim. Kids don’t know any better, they want the free thing, they hand over the info, and then the spam starts. And it doesn’t stop, because their system is set up to keep reaching out until you actually buy something. Unsubscribing or asking to be removed rarely works, because they just switch to a new phone number or email domain.
I’ve talked to more than a dozen parents about this in the last month, and tested out most of the common fixes, so I know what works and what doesn’t. The first mistake I made was replying STOP. A lot of spammers use that reply to confirm your number is active and monitored by a real person, then they sell your number to other ed tech spammers, so you just get more spam. Instead, the first thing to do is block the number immediately, don’t reply at all.
If they keep reaching out from new numbers (which they will), turn on your phone’s built-in spam filters. For iPhones, that’s Settings > Messages > toggle on Filter Unknown Senders, which sends all texts from people not in your contacts to a separate folder you never have to check. You can also turn on Silence Unknown Callers in the Phone app settings so calls from unknown numbers don’t even ring. For Android, open your messaging app, go to Settings, and turn on Spam Protection — most new Android phones have this built in now. That cut my MASAI texts from three a week to zero in three days, after I turned it on.
This whole mess ended up being a surprisingly good low-effort lesson for Leo about online incentives, too. We sat down for 10 minutes after that confusing Saturday trial confirmation text, and scrolled through his TikTok favorites to find all the links he’d clicked recently. We found three different posts from Minecraft influencers offering free skins that all asked for a phone number at the end. I pointed out that any free thing that’s just a digital file — a skin, a wallpaper, a promo code — doesn’t need your phone number to send it. Creators can just put it in the link description. Asking for contact info is always to sell you something later. We made a specific rule: any time he wants to claim any free thing online that asks for any contact info (phone, email, my name), he has to come show me first before he types anything in. It’s easy to remember, and it’s stopped him from clicking three more of those links in the last month.
If you still keep getting messages after turning on filters, one concrete step that worked for a friend of mine is to send an email to MASAI’s privacy address ([email protected]) and demand that they delete all your personal information from their system. Cite the CCPA or GDPR if you want, even if you don’t live in those regions — most companies will comply just to avoid a formal complaint. If that doesn’t work, file a complaint with the FCC (if you’re in the US) or your local telecom regulator. MASAI’s aggressive marketing violates a lot of national do not call rules, so regulators will usually flag their accounts.
Right now, I haven’t gotten a MASAI text in almost a week. The rule with Leo is working so far, and the spam filters catch the random ones that slip through from other companies using the same marketing trick. I know it’s not a permanent fix. Another kid coding camp started spamming me two days ago, using the exact same free game skin hook. This is just how a lot of new education brands grow now, and MASAI’s just the most aggressive one out there right now. We’ll keep adjusting the rules, keep updating the filters, and keep checking in when Leo finds a new free thing he wants. It’s not a big crisis, just another small thing to keep on top of when you’re raising a kid who lives half his life online.
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