What Is MASAI School And Why Is It Spamming My Kid’s Phone?
I was leaning against the kitchen counter last month, wiping granola crumbs off my 12-year-old Javi’s phone screen while he talked me through which old Roblox screenshots to delete. He’d run out of storage for new coding project files, so I’d offered to help clear space. That’s when I saw the message requests folder, full of 47 unread messages from accounts with names like “MASAI School Admissions” and “MASAI Teen Bootcamps”. I turned the phone to him. “You sign up for this?” Javi leaned in, groaned, and stuffed another handful of granola in his mouth. “No. I entered that free teen coding challenge last month for a free Minecraft skin badge, put my Instagram handle in. This started the next day. I don’t know how to make it stop.”
I counted three new messages that day alone, all promising last-chance discounts on their summer coding bootcamp, saying Javi had been pre-selected for a partial scholarship. When I checked my own email that night, sure enough, there were 11 unread messages from MASAI School in my promotions folder, dating back three weeks. Javi had put my number down as a parent contact for the challenge, so they were spamming both of us. I texted my friend Lila, who teaches tech at Javi’s middle school, to ask if she’d heard of it. She texted back an eye-roll emoji and said it’s all her students have been talking about for the past two months.
MASAI sponsors a ton of free teen hackathons and coding challenges on Instagram and TikTok, collects every contact info point kids put in the sign-up form, then spams them nonstop with bootcamp ads. If a kid’s profile is public, they’ll even find them and reach out even if they never entered anything. Lila said she’s had students as young as 11 get multiple friend requests from fake “admissions reps” who slide into DMs with ads before kids even accept the request. It’s aggressive, it’s constant, and it’s not just annoying—it’s confusing for kids who don’t know how to parse what’s a legitimate opportunity and what’s just spam.
Lila told me one of her top 8th grade coders stopped entering free challenges altogether because he got so much MASAI spam, he thought all free events were just lead traps. Another kid told her he was stressed for two weeks because MASAI kept saying his “scholarship application was expiring” and he thought he’d messed up a chance to get into a good program, even though he never applied. That’s when I asked Javi if he’d felt that way too. He shrugged and admitted he had. He’d been taught that if you sign up for something, you have to follow through. He thought because he entered their challenge, he owed them a response when they messaged. He didn’t know that it’s just automated spam scraping, that they don’t actually care if he responds or not, they just want him to click the link and pay for the bootcamp.
We sat down for 10 minutes after dinner that night and worked through it step by step. First, we went through all his social media accounts. I showed him how to bulk report all MASAI messages as spam on Instagram, then block every account that had messaged him. Then we went into his privacy settings and turned off message requests from anyone he doesn’t follow. That cuts 90% of the random outreach right there, no extra work after the initial setup. Then, we talked through the guilt piece. I pulled up the fine print from the coding challenge he entered, showed him the line that says “by entering, you agree to receive marketing communications from our sponsors, and can opt out at any time”. I told him that just because he gave them an email or a handle once doesn’t mean he has to talk to them ever again. We even practiced what he’d say if he got another one out loud, just to take the pressure off: “No thanks, stop contacting me.” It sounds silly, but it helped him stop feeling like he was being rude by ignoring them.
Next, we set up a free throwaway email address just for Javi to use when he enters contests, downloads free resources, or signs up for any event that asks for contact info. It’s just [email protected], he checks it once a month if he’s waiting for something specific, and all the spam just piles up there and never touches his main inbox or phone. It took 5 minutes to set up, and it’s already stopped a ton of junk from getting through. For my own phone, I added “MASAI Spam” as a contact and set all texts and calls from any number associated with them to go straight to my junk folder. Every time they text me from a new number, I just add it to the contact. It’s low effort, and it works.
MASAI isn’t the first company to do this, and they won’t be the last. For-profit education companies have figured out that targeting kids who are already interested in a skill like coding or graphic design works—you get a huge list of leads from a free $100 giveaway, and you can spam them until someone buys your course. What no one talks about is how this affects kids. They’re still learning how to navigate online interactions, they’re taught to be polite and respectful of people who reach out, and they don’t always recognize aggressive spam for what it is. It can make them anxious, it can turn them off from the things they love, just because they don’t want to deal with the constant outreach.
It’s been a month now, and we still get the occasional random MASAI DM or email. Javi just blocks it now, no stress, no guilt. He still enters free coding challenges every month, because he loves working on new projects, he just uses his throwaway email now. I still delete the ads that get through to my inbox once a week. It’s not a big problem anymore, but it still surprises me how little people talk about this kind of predatory spam targeting kids. No one warns you that when your kid gets into coding, they’ll end up being hounded by a for-profit bootcamp that doesn’t take no for an answer. We’ve figured out a system that works for us, but I know there are other parents and kids still getting bombarded, feeling overwhelmed like we did. It doesn’t take a big complicated fix, just a few small changes to settings and a quick conversation to take the guilt away. For now, that’s enough.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » What Is MASAI School And Why Is It Spamming My Kid’s Phone