Why Am I Getting Texts From MASAI School? What Parents And Teachers Need To Know
It’s 7:15 a.m., I’m wiping peanut butter crumbs off the kitchen counter, and my 13-year-old left her iPhone plugged in by the toaster when she ran to catch the bus. It buzzes once, then again, then a third time in 90 seconds. I lean over to turn the volume down before it wakes my toddler, and glance at the screen. The first text reads: “Hi Lila, you’ve been selected for 50% off our 12-week teen coding bootcamp – only 3 spots left in your area! Click to sign up: [link].” The sender is labeled MASAI School. Two minutes later, another one pops up, reminding her the offer expires at midnight.
I text Lila during her lunch break, asking if she signed up for anything from MASAI School. She texts back 10 minutes later: “Who is that never heard of them.” That night, I get a text from my friend Sarah, who teaches 4th grade at the local elementary. She says half the parents on her class email list got MASAI School spam that morning, and three parents already emailed her asking if the school sold their contact info. I check my own email junk folder, and sure enough, three unopened MASAI School emails from the past two weeks are sitting there.
I go to my neighborhood parent group chat to ask if anyone else is getting these. Within an hour, I have 17 replies. One mom says her 11-year-old got three texts in one day, addressed to her daughter by first name, and she has no idea how they got her number. A dad says he clicked the “unsubscribe” link on an email last week, and now he gets at least two texts a day. Another mom replied “STOP” to one of the texts, and got a call from a MASAI sales rep the next morning. That’s when I realized: this isn’t just a random spam blip. MASAI School, the for-profit coding bootcamp that markets heavily to teens and parents, is the new spammer on everyone’s block.
I started digging a little, because I was confused how they got Lila’s info, until I remembered last fall I signed her up for a free 1-hour virtual coding taster through a parenting website. The fine print at the bottom of the sign-up form said something about sharing info with “trusted third-party partners” that I just clicked through without reading. That’s how most of us end up on these lists, it turns out. You sign up for a free kids’ activity, enter your contact info for a school giveaway, or fill out a survey for a gift card, and your info gets sold to data brokers who sell it to companies like MASAI that are looking for potential customers.
It’s easy to just roll your eyes and mark it as junk, but this isn’t just an adult annoyance. For kids who are just starting to have their own phones and navigate independent online use, this kind of spam is confusing. Lila asked me the other night if she should have clicked the link, because 50% off sounded like a good deal, and they knew her name, so it must be legitimate, right? That’s the catch: spam like this is a perfect low-stakes teaching moment for online safety, but it also can lead to trouble if kids do click the wrong link.
First, the most important thing I tell other parents is don’t reply to the text, and don’t click the unsubscribe link. I know that sounds counterintuitive, because every message says reply “STOP” to unsubscribe, but almost every parent I talked to who did that ended up getting more messages. When you reply or click unsubscribe, you’re just telling the spammer that your number is active and monitored by a real person. They’ll either keep spamming you themselves, or sell your number to other spammers for a higher price.
Instead, just take 10 seconds to block the sender. For any unwanted MASAI text on your kid’s phone or yours, that’s the first step. On iPhones, that’s opening the message, tapping the sender name at the top of the screen, hitting “info”, then scrolling down to “block this caller”. On Androids, you tap the three dots in the top right corner and select block. MASAI does use new numbers all the time, so if you’re getting multiple messages a week from different numbers, forward the spam text to 7726 (that’s SPAM) – it’s free for all major US carriers, and flags the number to be blocked by the carrier network. I did that with three MASAI numbers a month ago, and I’ve only gotten one new text since.
For talking to kids, I don’t do big long lectures. I sat down with Lila one night after dinner while we were waiting for cookies to bake, and we went through her “unknown senders” folder in texts together. I showed her how to spot spam: any message from a name you don’t recognize, that offers a discount and asks you to click a link, even if it has your name, is spam. I told her if she gets any message like that, she just has to show me before she taps anything – that’s the only rule. We found two other spam messages from different tutoring companies while we were looking, deleted them, and that was that. It took 10 minutes, and now she points out spam to me when she sees it on my phone.
For teachers, like Sarah who got all those parent questions, the simplest thing to do is send a one-sentence email to your class parents saying “We never share your contact information with MASAI School or any other for-profit education companies – any messages you get from them are not affiliated with our class.” That clears up confusion immediately, so parents don’t blame the school for the spam, and it’s a quick reminder to parents to watch out for it.
Last week, I found another MASAI School email in my junk folder, so they haven’t gone away completely. Lila still gets a text from a new MASAI number every week or two, but now she just screenshots it and sends it to me, I block it, and we move on. It’s annoying, for sure – I don’t love that a company that wants my money to teach my kid can’t be bothered to follow marketing rules and stop spamming us. But it’s also turned into a small, regular way to practice online safety that doesn’t feel like a chore. I used to think I needed to set aside a big chunk of time to talk to Lila about internet safety and scams. Now, it’s just a 30 second interaction when a new spam text pops up, and that’s enough for now. We don’t have all the answers, and I’m sure we’ll get more spam in the future, but what we’re doing is working well enough.
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