I just received spam from Atlassian with the subject "[Atlassian Community] You earned the Level 0 badge." To me, It's annoyance at best or a banal deep-rooted form of stupidity on Atlassian's part.
Generally, I let gmail handle spam but the idiocy of this one, made me go and turrn off updates from Atlassian.
You can also turn off badge notifications specifically in your profile. Sorry for your negative experience!
Can you stop badges appearing on your profile to others?
@Brad D currently not, sorry about that. You kind of have to hunt for it on someone's profile page, if that helps.