What Is MASAI School: Why It’s Spamming Kids And What Parents Can Do
Last Tuesday I was folding laundry at the kitchen table while my 13-year-old Javi did his homework on his hand-me-down iPad. He got up to grab a root beer from the fridge, and a push notification popped up that caught my eye: “You’ve been selected for an exclusive free MASAI School coding scholarship! Click to claim your spot now.”
I tilted the screen toward me and tapped open his notification folder while he was gone. There were seven more MASAI messages waiting: three emails, two Instagram DMs, a comment on his public Roblox fan art post, even a text to his school-issued Google Voice number. When Javi came back, I nodded at the screen and asked what that was all about.
He rolled his eyes and dropped his soda on the table, leaving a wet ring. “They spam everyone. My whole class gets them. Milo clicked one last month because he thought it was from the coding club, and they texted him 10 times a day for a week. When he blocked the number, they started texting from a new one.”
I’d seen the name before, popping up in random comments on my own parenting Instagram posts, even on a baking TikTok my best friend Lila—who’s a middle school computer tech teacher—posts for fun. I texted her that night to ask if she’d been getting hit too, and she called me five minutes later ranting. MASAI’s been emailing her every other day for two months, asking her to share their free coding offers with her students. She asked them to stop three times, and they just started emailing from a new official address each time. “They even left a comment on my video about sourdough,” she said. “Like, what about sourdough makes them think I want to promote a coding bootcamp to my followers?”
For anyone who hasn’t run into them yet, MASAI School is an edtech platform that teaches coding, mostly focused right now on grabbing kid and teen users to build their customer base. Their marketing strategy basically boils down to scraping any public contact info they can find online—kid social media accounts, teacher email directories, public parent forum posts—and spamming everyone with offers for free classes and scholarships. It’s not an outright scam, from what I’ve read, but it’s the most aggressive spam I’ve seen targeting kids and education spaces in years.
What worries me isn’t just the annoying notifications, either. Most adults know to ignore random DMs from accounts we don’t follow, but a lot of kids don’t have that context yet. Javi told me several kids in his class thought the “exclusive scholarship” offers were real, because they mentioned their city or their school in the subject line—easy for a bot to pull from a public profile. A kid who’s into coding gets excited at the idea of a free spot, hands over their phone number or email, and suddenly their inbox is flooded, and their contact info is likely sold to other marketing lists that spam them with more edtech offers, college prep schemes, you name it.
After talking to Javi and Lila, I jotted down the small, concrete things we’ve done to cut down on the spam and help Javi spot it on his own, that don’t take a lot of time or effort. First, I sat down with Javi for 10 minutes and went over three easy red flags he can spot in 10 seconds: any offer that says you’re “exclusively selected” when you never applied for anything, any offer that asks for a phone number or parent credit card even for a “free” class, and any message that comes from an account you don’t follow, in a comment or DM. That’s easy enough for a 13-year-old to remember, no complicated lessons needed.
Next, we adjusted his privacy settings on every platform he uses. For Instagram, TikTok, and Roblox, we turned off DMs from anyone he doesn’t follow—you can do this in 2 taps in the privacy settings on all three apps, and it blocks 90% of random spam from bots like MASAI’s. We also set his comments to only let people he follows comment, which stopped the random MASAI comments on his Roblox art entirely.
If your kid already clicked a link and gave out their contact info, you don’t have to panic. Just open every email from MASAI, tap “block sender” (it’s in the three-dot menu on most email services) and mark it as spam. For text messages, block the number, then forward the text to 7726 (it spells SPAM) on most US carriers to report it. Lila told me for teachers who keep getting emails, just add the MASAI domain to your school email’s blocked sender list and send a quick note to your IT department—she did that a week ago, and hasn’t gotten a single email since.
I’m not against coding classes for kids, for what it’s worth. Javi wants to learn to build his own games, and we’re looking into a local after-school class that fits our schedule. The problem isn’t that MASAI teaches coding—it’s that they’ve decided the best way to grow is to spam kids and teachers, and there’s very little anyone can do to stop them entirely. Edtech platforms have been pushing into youth spaces for years, but this is the first time I’ve seen one with such a completely unregulated, aggressive approach that targets kids directly where they talk and post online.
We’ve had no MASAI DMs for 10 days now, after adjusting Javi’s settings. But I still see their comments pop up every once in a while. Last week I found one on a two-year-old post I made in a local parent group, asking for recommendations for kids’ coding classes. It’s still there, the link bright blue, waiting for a parent who’s scrolling for options to click. It’s not going to go away entirely, I think. It’s just another small thing to add to the list of online habits we have to teach our kids to watch for. But at least now Javi knows exactly what to do when he sees one pop up.
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