What Is MASAI School? Why Parents And Teachers Are Getting Spammed Nonstop
It’s 7:12 a.m., my sourdough toast is smoking in the toaster and the kettle’s screaming for attention when my phone buzzes five times in a row. I wipe peanut butter off my wrist and pull up my 4th grade PTA WhatsApp group, where we usually swap forgotten lunch notes and used soccer cleat offers. Instead, five identical messages stare back: “Unlock your child’s coding potential with a free 1-hour workshop from MASAI School – limited spots, click here!”
A mom comments 30 seconds later: “Wait, I didn’t send that. Did my account get hacked?” Another parent replies that she got three DMs from MASAI accounts on Instagram yesterday, and another says a fake profile asked to join her kid’s soccer team group last week posing as a new parent. I’d never heard of MASAI School until two months ago, when we got our first fake join request. Back then, I just approved it because the requester said her daughter was in Mr. Torres’s class, which matched our roster. Ten minutes after she got in, she spammed the group and left, and we couldn’t figure out where she’d come from. It happened again two weeks later, then again, and I started asking other PTA reps in the area what was going on.
Every single one of them said the same thing. MASAI School, a for-profit coding program that’s expanded rapidly into K-12 after starting as an adult bootcamp, has built its recent user growth on aggressive spam tactics. Their affiliate marketers scrape contact information from public school directories, student coding club Instagram pages, and public parent group member lists, then create fake profiles to join closed groups, hijack low-security real accounts, and spam anyone who looks like a parent of a school-aged kid. One admin I talked to told me she’d removed 17 MASAI-linked fake accounts from her district’s parent groups in the last month alone. One fake account even posed as a grandparent to get into a local kindergarten group, just to drop the link and disappear.
My 16-year-old niece has been looking for after-school coding classes to build her portfolio for college apps, and she told me she’s gotten 19 DMs from different MASAI accounts since she followed a teen coding hashtag last month. Blocking one just means another pops up a day later. A mom in my group signed up for the free workshop out of curiosity a few weeks back, and she said the whole thing was 25 minutes of scare tactics about kids falling behind in STEM if they don’t learn coding now, and five minutes of a hard sell for a $600 3-month course that turned out to have 40 kids per class, not the 10 that was advertised.
It’s easy to write this off as just another annoying internet spam problem, but it’s started causing real small issues in our parent communities. Last month, a new mom posted in our group asking for recommendations for a speech therapist for her 4-year-old, and half the group ignored it because they assumed it was another MASAI spam post. That kind of erodes the trust that makes these groups useful in the first place.
After our last district PTA meeting, we put three small changes in place that have cut our MASAI spam by almost 80% so far, and they take almost no extra work. First, we added a simple approval question to all our group join requests that only a current parent would know the answer to. Right now ours is “What color is our 2024 class field day t-shirt?” Real parents answer in two seconds, and fake accounts can’t Google that information. It’s way more effective than just asking what class your kid is in, because that information is often public anyway.
Second, we pinned a 1-sentence note at the top of every group that says “Unsolicited MASAI School messages are almost always spam from fake or hacked accounts. Do not click links, and tag an admin if you see one.” That cuts down on people accidentally sharing the link because they think it’s from a trusted friend. Third, any time we remove a spammer, we block the email and phone number they used to request access, which keeps them from making a new profile with the same info right away.
For individual parents, the steps are just as simple. If you get an unsolicited DM from a MASAI account on any social platform, block it and report it as spam. Most platforms will flag similar accounts after one or two reports. If you see a message from someone you know offering a free MASAI workshop, don’t click the link, just send them a quick text that says “Heads up, your account might have been hacked – you sent a spam link to our parent group.” Most people have no idea their account was compromised; a friend of mine found out hers was hacked this way, and all she had to do was change her password and turn on two-factor authentication to fix it. If you’re actually looking for a coding class for your kid, just cross-check any company you’re considering with other local parents before you put in any credit card info.
We haven’t stopped all the MASAI spam completely. Last week we got a fake request that actually got the t-shirt color right – probably someone who scraped it from a parent’s public social media post – but we caught it within 10 minutes before the link got much traction. It’s just one more small thing to keep an eye on, between planning the spring auction and reminding kids to bring their water bottles to practice. MASAI’s betting that enough people will click their link and sign up for their courses to make all the spam worth it, and they don’t care that they’re cluttering up spaces that are supposed to be for our kids. For now, our small fixes are working, and that’s enough.
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