Why Is MASAI School Spamming My Kid’s Phone? What Parents Need To Know
I was grabbing my 13-year-old Jax’s phone to plug it in by the couch last Tuesday, half-listening to my 7-year-old argue about which cartoon to watch after dinner, when the screen kept lighting up over and over. Three texts in a minute, two missed calls, a push notification for a “free coding bootcamp for teens” from MASAI School. I unlocked it to mute the notifications, and scrolled up—there were 12 more from the past three days, all from different 10-digit numbers, all the same sales pitch.
I called Jax back in from the backyard, where he was playing basketball with the neighbor kid, and asked how they got his number. He shrugged, said he filled out a quick “What Coding Job Are You?” quiz on Instagram a couple weeks prior, just to see if he’d get “game developer” (he did). To get the result sent to him, he had to put in his phone number. He didn’t think twice about it. I didn’t blame him. I’d gotten my first MASAI call a month earlier, after I clicked a link on a parent forum listing cheap summer camps for tech-interested kids. I put in my number to get the full list, and suddenly I was getting two calls a week from them too.
I texted my friend Sarah, who teaches 8th grade at Jax’s middle school, to ask if she’d heard anything. She wrote back 10 minutes later saying she’d had three kids mention the same exact spam in the past week. One of her students answered a call from MASAI during a unit test last week—he thought it was his mom, who’d been having emergency doctor’s appointments that month—and got a five-minute sales pitch that left him flustered and unable to finish his test. The calls have been buzzing out of lockers during class too, enough that she’s had to remind kids to put their phones on silent twice more than usual this month.
MASAI School isn’t some tiny scam operation, for context. It’s a growing edtech company that teaches coding bootcamps, and they’re currently pushing hard to get new teen customers in the U.S. Their growth strategy just happens to rely on really aggressive cold outreach, even after people ask to stop calling, even when the person they’re calling never actually signed up to be contacted. They buy leaked or shared lead lists from all those little random quizzes and free offer pop-ups that kids love to click on social media, then they cycle through hundreds of different phone numbers so blocking one doesn’t stop them. That’s why they’re the new spammer on the block that every parent I know has run into in the past couple months.
It’s easy to brush this off as just another annoying spam problem, the kind we all deal with as adults. But it’s different for kids. Most of them haven’t learned yet that any random online form asking for your number isn’t just for sending you the quiz result—it’s selling your contact info to the highest bidder. And when they get 10 calls a week from unknown numbers, they start to get anxious: what if it’s the coach changing practice time? What if it’s a friend with a new number? What if I miss something important because I ignore it? Jax told me he’d started answering all unknown calls for three days because he was waiting to hear back from a summer job he applied for, and that just meant MASAI called him even more, because they mark active numbers as higher priority.
After we sorted through all the texts that night, we put a couple small fixes in place that have cut the spam down to almost nothing. First, instead of manually blocking every new MASAI number (which was what Jax had been doing, and it wasn’t working), we turned on the built-in spam silencer that already comes with his phone. For iPhones, that’s toggling on “Silence Unknown Callers” in the Phone settings. For Android, you turn on “Spam and Call Screen” in the Google Phone app settings. The only catch is that any number not saved to your contacts gets sent straight to voicemail, so we sat down for 10 minutes and added all the numbers from his soccer team, closest friends, and all our family members to his contacts. That way he never misses a call from someone he actually wants to hear from.
The second fix we added was a free secondary Google Voice number that he uses for any random online form, quiz, or free offer that asks for a phone number. It forwards to his main phone if we want it to, but if it starts getting spammed, we can just change it and no one cares. It takes five minutes to set up, and it doesn’t cost anything, so it’s way easier than stressing about where your kid’s number is getting sold.
I also reported the repeated unwanted calls to the FTC through reportfraud.ftc.gov. It took two minutes to fill out the form, and it’s the only way regulators start going after companies that ignore do not call rules. I know one report doesn’t do much, but if enough parents do it, it adds up.
Right now, we haven’t gotten a MASAI call or text on Jax’s phone in 12 days. I still get one a week on my main number, so it’s not like the problem is gone entirely. I don’t think it ever will be, honestly—there’s always a new company looking for leads that’s willing to annoy hundreds of thousands of people to get them. All we can do is adjust the small settings on our phones and teach our kids one small trick at a time to keep the spam from taking over their day.
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