What Is MASAI School Spam? What Parents Need To Know Right Now
I was grabbing my 13-year-old Javi’s dead iPhone off the kitchen counter last Tuesday when it lit up with seven pings in 10 seconds. I didn’t mean to snoop, but the screen was face up, and a flood of identical messages popped up: Win a free iPad! Learn coding from experts, sign up here! Tag 3 friends to get a free MASAI hoodie! When Javi wandered in a minute later grabbing a granola bar, I nodded at the phone. “What’s all this?” He shrugged. “Oh, that MASAI School group. Some random guy added me last week. It’s annoying, I forget to leave.”
Javi said it started about a month ago. First, a random account he didn’t recognize DMed him asking if he wanted free coding lessons. Then he got added to a group chat with 40 other kids from our area, most of whom he goes to school with. Now, the messages hit every 10 minutes, sometimes more. I asked around in the parent chat for Javi’s grade that night, and by the next morning I had 12 replies from other parents saying their kids got the exact same thing. One mom said her 11-year-old daughter clicked the link to enter the iPad giveaway, filled out the whole form with her mom’s cell number and email, and now she’s getting 8 to 10 spam texts and emails a day from MASAI and random loan companies and diet pill ads. My neighbor’s 12-year-old son got roped into inviting all his contacts to get a chance at free AirPods, and half the parents on his contact list ended up complaining to his mom.
I looked it up out of curiosity, and found that MASAI School is a tech education program that teaches coding to kids and teens, part of a bigger bootcamp for adult learners. Their whole growth strategy right now relies on kids to market to other kids, with referral incentives for bringing in new sign-ups. That’s why it’s spreading so fast: it’s not a random anonymous scam, technically. But their approach is straight-up spam, and it’s entirely targeted at minors who don’t know better than to click a link for free stuff. It’s popped up everywhere kids hang out online: Instagram group chats, TikTok comments, Snapchat quick adds, even Roblox message boards. It’s the new unwanted spam clogging up kids’ inboxes, and a lot of parents haven’t even heard of it yet.
I used to just do the generic parent thing: tell Javi “don’t click random links” and call it a day. But after talking to that mom whose phone was blowing up, I realized generic advice doesn’t work. Kids get bombarded with this stuff every day, and free iPads and hoodies sound way better to a 13-year-old than “be careful.” So I carved out 10 minutes while we waited for our dinner delivery to go through a few concrete things with Javi, and most of it took less than a minute to do.
First, we adjusted his Instagram settings to stop random people from adding him to groups. I didn’t even know this setting existed until I searched it, but it’s super easy: go to Settings, tap Privacy, tap Messages, then go to Group Controls and switch it from “Everyone” to “Only People You Follow.” That one change cut down 90% of the random adds for Javi right away. We did the same thing on his Snapchat and TikTok, too—both have similar settings to stop unknown users from adding you or sending you messages. That’s the first thing any parent can do, it takes two minutes per app.
Next, we talked through what information is okay to share for random giveaways, and made a clear rule. I didn’t just say “don’t share your info.” I said: any giveaway that asks for more than your first name and a junk email (we made a separate email just for this kind of thing years ago) has to get checked by me first. No exceptions, even if your best friend sent it. If it asks for your full name, your school name, your phone number, or any of my info, that’s an automatic no. That’s specific enough for a kid to follow, no guesswork. I also pointed out that 99% of these giveaways don’t actually give away the big prizes anyway—they just collect your info to sell to other spammers. Javi nodded, he’d already gotten tired of the constant pings distracting him during homework, so that landed pretty well.
When Javi mentioned that one of his friends got a free MASAI hoodie for getting 10 people to sign up, I didn’t freak out and tell him he couldn’t do it. I just asked him, “How annoyed are you by all these random group adds? Do you want to send that same annoying spam to 200 of your friends just for a cheap hoodie that’ll probably fall apart in two washes?” He thought for a second and said no, that made sense. He did ask if he could try coding classes if he wanted, and I told him we could check out the free coding club the high school runs for middle schoolers, or check out the free lessons the public library has, which don’t require him spamming anyone to join.
It’s been three weeks since we adjusted the settings and made that rule, and Javi hasn’t gotten a random MASAI group add since. I still see parents posting about it in our regional parent groups every week, though—last week someone said their 10-year-old got spammed on TikTok, and the week before that a dad said his kid’s school sent out a note about it because so many kids were getting distracted during class by the constant pings.
This isn’t one of those problems that gets fixed once and goes away. New spammers targeting kids pop up every few months, and this is just the latest one. It’s not a huge crisis that’s going to ruin your kid’s life, but it’s annoying, it can lead to a ton of unwanted spam for you, and it’s a good chance to walk your kid through simple online safety habits that stick. Right now, adjusting a few settings and having one 10-minute conversation is working for us, and that’s good enough for me.
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