Crime Even More Problems at Roblox (RBLX) - "Roblox has facilitated more child abuse than any public company in history."

(Link) (https://archive.ph/jtgqp)

SPRATE NOTE: this article is partially behind a paywall - everything in this post is what was publicly available.

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Roblox (NYSE: RBLX — $18.0 billion) is a popular platform for children generally between six and fourteen to play online. The Bear Cave previously published on Roblox in February 2022 and alleged that “the company has engaged in litigation and intimidation to help conceal allegations of pedophilia on the platform.” Today’s investigation by The Bear Cave finds that Roblox has facilitated hundreds of known child abuse cases, popular Roblox game developers have been arrested on child abuse allegations, Roblox games include images of dismembered bodies and Nazi logos, and the company has been linked to child suicide attempts and the widespread production of child pornography. In sum, The Bear Cave believes Roblox has facilitated more child abuse than any public company in history.

In April of this year, FOX2Detroit reported that 21-year-old Danil Baker met a 14-year-old girl through Roblox and “pretended to be a 17-year-old” and “convinced the victim to give him her phone number and started texting, and allegedly convinced the girl to share nude images.” Baker then “picked her up from school in Ohio and took her to a park [and] coerced her to perform sex acts on him.” At the time, Baker was out on bond for a separate pending criminal case also involving a minor.

Ultimately, the 14-year-old girl was “found crying alone in the bathroom of a Kroger.”

In February 2022, 33-year-old Howard Graham drove around 900 miles to meet a 13-year-old girl he had connected with two days earlier on Roblox. Graham drove the girl from her home in Topeka, Kansas back to his home in Clayton County, Georgia. The next month Graham, who had a prior criminal matter from 2007, was arrested on multiple charges including “rape, kidnapping, and sex trafficking.” Regarding the case, Clayton County Police Captain John Ivy said,

“The subject got on there, praising these little kids, because they think they’re playing on there with other kids. And they’re not. They’re playing with people who are preying on kids. We’re extremely lucky we found this young girl and she’s alive.”

Police found the 13-year-old girl outside a Dollar General.

In January of this year, a federal jury in Grand Island, Nebraska indicted 26-year-old Tadashi Kojima on charges he “willfully and unlawfully kidnapped a 13-year-old and took the minor across state lines with the intent to engage in illegal sexual activity.” The child’s father told police “his son had been communicating with someone while playing Roblox and then was invited to talk on a chatroom service.” In an interview, the child’s mother, Heather McConney, said in part,

“I don’t understand what this person had on my son. What grasp he had on him that convinced him to just walk away.”

(Heather McConney, mother of a 13-year-old boy who was kidnapped after messaging a predator on Roblox.)

Grand Island Police found the 13-year-old boy along with Kojima sitting inside a white Toyota Avalon at a Git-N-Split convenience store.

Law enforcement seems acutely aware that Roblox is an unchallenging place for predators to meet children. For example, Osiel Mendoza Guevara, a 20-year-old Georgia sheriff’s deputy, flew from Georgia to Alabama to allegedly meet with a 16-year-old girl he had connected with over Roblox. Guevara was charged with “enticing a child for immoral purposes” this January. News reports added, “Investigators are asking parents to keep a close eye on what their children are doing on these platforms, saying evil intent can lurk in what appears to be the most harmless of activities.”

An October 2022 lawsuit filed in the San Francisco Superior Court against Roblox “for the harms caused to a 13-year-old [girl] and her family, beginning when she was only 10 years old, from use of and exposure to Defendants’ unreasonably dangerous and defective products” raises more concerns.

The lawsuit alleges at age ten the victim, abbreviated as S.U., was given an iPad with Roblox installed but was quickly connected to “adult men who abused her for months” and was coerced into downloading other apps to share inappropriate photos. The lawsuit also alleges, in part,

“From the outset, S.U. was approached by adult males who claimed to want to be her ‘friend.’ They were allowed to message her privately through the Roblox private message features, but also messaged her in group chats once they learned that she was a minor female. S.U. always wondered how Roblox knew when someone was swearing, or fighting, or engaged in other ‘prohibited’ behavior on the Roblox game but ignored entirely the rampant and overt sexual advances she received from adult players on a regular basis.”

(Page 57 of October 2022 lawsuit against Roblox and others.)

The lawsuit adds that the victim attempted suicide in July 2020, attempted suicide again in August 2020, and planned a third attempt for her 12th birthday in March 2021. Ultimately, she “had to withdraw from school after multiple suicide attempts.”

A recent video by popular 26-year-old Roblox YouTuber Ruben Sim appears to corroborate the lawsuit’s allegations that predators often first meet children on Roblox and then use Roblox to lure children to other sites. For example, in some Roblox group chats used to trade virtual items such as virtual clothing and accessories, The Bear Cave believes predators will encourage children to download other apps, like Snapchat and Discord, to have more open communication.

In one Roblox chat first highlighted by Ruben Sim, a Roblox user says “add me to trade on [ghost emoji] (only girls)” with the ghost emoji representing Snapchat. Another user writes “add me to trade on [disc emoji] girls. (14 btw),” a likely reference to Discord.


(Screenshots from December 2022 Ruben Sim YouTube video “ROBLOX NEEDS MY HELP” 6:36 mark and 6:52 mark)

Roblox doesn’t appear to appreciate the efforts to highlight pedophilia on its platform. In November 2021, Roblox sued YouTuber Ruben Sim for $1.6 million and issued a lifetime ban on his usage of the platform.

Nonetheless, many top comments on the Ruben Sim Roblox video agree that Roblox moderation is not up to par and read, in part,

“Roblox really is just falling apart. Glad you're doing stuff like this because the Roblox moderators don't do [anything] literally almost half of the time unless they are caught…”

“Imagine a multi-billion-dollar corporation not being able to have a bare minimum moderation team.”

“It’s sad that most of the time Roblox moderation literally has to be called out by the voices of big YouTubers to take decisions on stuff like these.”

Sometimes the predators are Roblox’s own game developers.

In July 2022, Roblox game developer Arnold Castillo was “arrested on charges of transportation of a minor with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity and coercion and enticement of a minor.” Castillo had gained a major following on Roblox starting in 2017 after developing a popular Sonic the Hedgehog spinoff Roblox game and would allegedly encourage children to join his off-platform Discord server for the game.

Notably, in an unlisted October 2022 video with over 1 million views titled, “The Roblox Developer Arrested By The FBI” Ruben Sim said he had repeatedly warned Roblox and police about Castillo as early as 2020, but the company took de minimis action.

The top comment on that video reads,

“The fact that Roblox protected this predator is insane, thankfully police finally took action against him.”

Problems in Roblox’s developer community run deep.

Another example is “MisterObvious” a major Roblox developer who won a “Bloxy award” from Roblox for being one of the best developers in the Roblox community. Ruben Sim later published videos, audio, and text screenshots showing “MisterObvious” sending and soliciting inappropriate content from underage girls. In addition, in April 2017 he filed a police report and in June 2017 uploaded a video on YouTube with over 1.2 million views covering the allegations. Roblox ultimately terminated MisterObvious’s account… in May 2021.

And just earlier this month another popular Roblox developer faced allegations of inappropriate conduct.

These issues extend to Roblox corporate as well. As The Bear Cave previously reported: “Roblox’s former social media manager ran a pornographic blog while employed by the company. Roblox’s official Twitter account retweeted content made by a self-described pedophile [and] Roblox allegedly shut down its own community forum after it became inundated with links to illegal child porn sites.”

None of these are isolated cases. Below is just a sampling of additional stories on child abuse facilitated by Roblox:

29-year-old convicted pedophile Owain Thomas “groomed 150 children to engage in sexual activity using Roblox” and the volume of abuse was “possibly unprecedented.” 48-year-old registered sex offender Clinton McElroy was arrested after convincing an 8-year-old girl “into sending sexually explicit videos in exchange for Robux.” 18-year-old Ron Machluf was indicted for using Roblox “to lure and commit sexual offenses against several girls between the ages of 7 and 12.” 23-year-old Terrence Barto was arrested for “indecent solicitation of a child, violation of sex offender registry and grooming” after “he contacted a 12-year-old boy in Texas via Roblox.” 61-year-old John Mathew Piecuch was indicted after posing as a 13-year-old boy on Roblox and “contacting a 12-year-old girl and requesting sexually explicit photos of her and her 5-year-old sibling.” 45-year-old Patrick Shane Penczak was charged with seven counts of crimes against children after meeting kids through Roblox. Two months ago, 21-year-old Daniel Diaz was arrested “for contacting a minor for purposes of committing a felony offense” after meeting with a child he contacted through Roblox. And last week, 19-year-old Faruq Balogun was arrested “for arranging to meet with a minor for lewd purposes” after connecting with a child on Roblox.

Roblox CEO and founder David Baszucki sees things differently. In a June 2023 interview with The Verge titled, “Roblox doesn’t want to be just a kids game,” Baszucki was asked about the company’s conversations with lawmakers around safety on the platform and responded, in part,

“I think we are in an exceptional position both from a company culture point of view as well as strategically what we are building as a platform. Our Civility people are out speaking in various forums trying to take a leadership role in what’s the vision for kids on the Internet.” (13:52)

(Roblox CEO and founder David Baszucki talks about how Roblox “keeps the platform safe for kids.”)

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That's it, the rest is paywalled. If anybody gets ahold of the rest of the article, I'll add it here.

Subscribe to Ruben Sim.

 

[Gish]

From an outsider looking in perspective on Roblox, it seems like every year they try to push it towards being a sort of Second Life-esque experience instead of just virtual Lego worlds, which is a horrifying thought considering how much creepy shit happens on Second Life (and how creepy/pedo-friendly Roblox is already)
Also wasn't a Roblox janny/admin caught liking bara furry porn on his Roblox affiliated Twitter account? I vaguely remember something like that happening in regards to all the Ruben Sim stuff. It shouldn't be a surprise so much of this is ignored by Roblox when they have people like that moderating the site

 

[Geddy Lee's Fee and See]

You have to monitor your kids online. The game has settings where you can set accounts up for them. You can log in and see their chats, you can set it to no chat at all. You can set it that they can’t accept a friend without your say so or chat to anyone .
I did all this and was astonished at how many friend requests they got. I think kids can use it safely, but it takes a bit of oversight from the parent.
Minecraft is better for kids IMO, but they do like Roblox. It’s like digital crack for kids. I suppose they have to learn to be online these days so unless you’re going the no screens at all route then very supervised access at first is ok.

Yeah, but all that requires you pay attention to what your kid does on the Internet, which for some reason most parents can't do even though they give their pre-teen and younger kids smartphones and unsupervised Internet access. It really just goes to show how stupid the average person is that this is a novel concept and how uncommon common sense is.

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

Obvious pedophilia aside- this is just pathetic.

900 miles, I wouldn't drive that unless I had a stack of cash waiting for me, or a life-saving procedure I desperately need or something.

 

[Titty Figurine]

Now do Discord.

I do not wish to contemplate the relief boners of Discord mods reading this and realizing that the crosshairs have shifted, their kitten harems are still snugly tucked away on private servers.

In all seriousness I had no idea Roblox was this bad and that is some horrifying shit. If someone had taken an excerpt of this and asked me to guess which online environment it was I really would have bet the house on Discord. The fact that those numbers are coming from not a chat service but a children's game is so fucked up.

 

[whatever I feel like]

99 problems but their stock price isn't one. Actually... it seems like they recently reverted to literally the same price they were on Jan. 1st, wiping out a whole year of "gains." Still, if you go 1Y instead of YTD it just looks like more normalcy. Is Roblox worth ten times what Ubisoft is or 15, Wall Street just can't make up its mind.

 

[Whoopsie Daisy]

We need to Minecraft everyone at Roblox

 

[Q !!Hs1Jq13jV6]

i'm surprised that they aren't doing anything considering they are known for monitoring and logging all chats, see that one time a kid got arrested for telling his classmate he was going to bring a gun to school over roblox
and they had somewhat of a record for banning pedos, at least in the early days
now i wonder if they fired their jannies or if they just don't bother with the volume

Roblox allegedly shut down its own community forum after it became inundated with links to illegal child porn sites.

this is like saying kf is a terrorist website full of immediate threats to human life
their forum shutdown because the company couldn't be bothered to deal with raids

 

[RollerGator]

Ruben Sim, the YouTuber mentioned in the article, is very familiar with the game, having played it since he was a child. He's been so instrumental in exposing and raising awareness about the pedophilia on the platform that, as discussed in the article, Roblox sued him to try and shut him up.

Also the Roblox Oof is one of the most well-known, reused, recognizable sound-effects on the Internet. You don't need to be familiar with the game to know what it is.

@SSj_Ness was defending lolicon in a different thread btw because "muh japanese culture"

 

[Pimpleking55]

So after reading this article, one question keeps popping up....where are the parents?. Yes children lie and hide things from you but they are also fucking stupid so there is no excuse to not know what they are up to. If your 8 year old is receiving dick pics and feels unsafe to run to you for help, there is something fundamentally wrong in your relationship with your child and second, anything that gives a child under 16 unfiltered access to strangers on the internet should be,or under your strict control or banned from entering your house. Some genuine interest in your offspring might go a long way, and prevent them from being raped in a truckstop toilet.

Obvious pedophilia aside- this is just pathetic.

Or a very dedicated future son in law,but be honest you have to give him an A for effort....most people wouldn't even go across the street if they dont know for sure you are putting out.

 

[Sprate Header]

i'm surprised that they aren't doing anything

Well they did sue one of the main people exposing child predators on their platform. Really cool way for a children's platform to conduct itself.

 

[rrtyui]

Gonna be a little contrarian here; it really isn't that big of an issue. The game clocks at 22 million players worldwide on all platforms, most children. Of course there's gonna be a few cases like this. The game itself is like a Leviathan of the child's gaming industry. I don't know a single person in my generation who didn't play it at least once as a kid.

Journos have been chimping out at ROBLOX for nearly a decade at this point and I think that has more to do with their size than anything. There are places like VRChat, which are 1000x more predatory and if you doubt that, download the computer client and hop in a public world for yourself. The reason VRChat doesn't get this kind of coverage while ROBLOX does is just fear-bait.

To be clear, the problem still exists, it's just not as widespread as the media makes it out to be. As a billion dollar corporation, obviously ROBLOX ought to do better, but I'm not necessarily freaking out about it, especially when these problems could be fixed completely if the parents took some accountability.

So after reading this article, one question keeps popping up....where are the parents?. Yes children lie and hide things from you but they are also fucking stupid so there is no excuse to not know what they are up to. If your 8 year old is receiving dick pics and feels unsafe to run to you for help, there is something fundamentally wrong in your relationship with your child and second, anything that gives a child under 16 unfiltered access to strangers on the internet should be,or under your strict control or banned from entering your house. Some genuine interest in your offspring might go a long way, and prevent them from being raped in a truckstop toilet.

Tsmt, Gen Alpha will be one that was raised by the internet. Like how some parents would make the TV babysit their kid, except now it isn't approved programming on a couple channels, it's trannies and pedos and tranny pedos making the content.

Something could be said here about the internet helping to uproot the family structure and isolate people, but what do I know?

 

[6MillionCoofs]

You have to monitor your kids online. The game has settings where you can set accounts up for them. You can log in and see their chats, you can set it to no chat at all. You can set it that they can’t accept a friend without your say so or chat to anyone .
I did all this and was astonished at how many friend requests they got. I think kids can use it safely, but it takes a bit of oversight from the parent.

That’s what always bugs me about these games. The parents have all the tools available to make sure their children are safe but rarely if ever use them.

 

[Pixy]

The Kojima guy is the same furfag from here.

https://kiwifarms.st/threads/demi-f...nicated-with-on-twitter.142560/#post-14081455

I guess he legally changed his name from Aaron Zeman.

 

[Waifu Denier]

You also have all the regular non sexual exploitation of kids on Roblox. I'm pretty sure most of the big time creators on the platform who help make the custom game modes and rake in the big bucks use kids as child labor since they don't know any better and are easily swayed by a famous name.

 

[2LtMashengo]

I assumed it was an obscure Minecraft ripoff based on the title.

Roblox released long before Minecraft and took up far too much of early zoomers' childhoods.
Roblox developers walked so that Minecraft youtubers could run.

 

[William Tyndale]

When my kids were younger they played Roblox occasionally. I got on there just to see what the game was all about. I was amazed at the unfettered access I got to kids who sounded as young as 8 or 10. I think I was on it for maybe 10 minutes but I could have said anything I wanted to any of those kids with absolutely zero parental involvement. Iirc they will ban you for bullying but apparently they don’t ban you for grooming.

 

[Coolio55]

Doesn't surprise me. Roblox a really fucking good game* run by a really fucking awful company. They have an amazing knack for doing the worst thing in any situation. Ignoring pedos. Banning people for stupid reasons. Exploiting legions of children. Suing someone for pointing out inconvenient things (pedos) and trolling. It's a true miracle that Roblox has such a rich and diverse culture.

*when it's not shitty tycoons, cliques and microtransactions

 

[TheDarknessGrows]

A coworker's 11 year old son sits at work all day playing Roblox. It is pretty weird stuff. He'll spend hours trying to find dresses and shoes for his character's fashion shows and Mom doesn't bat an eye. Maybe if he was playing SWAT or something but he plays and loves a poorly made fashion show game run by pedophiles and Mom applauds.

 

[rrtyui]

You also have all the regular non sexual exploitation of kids on Roblox. I'm pretty sure most of the big time creators on the platform who help make the custom game modes and rake in the big bucks use kids as child labor since they don't know any better and are easily swayed by a famous name.

From my corner of the platform, no. It doesn't make sense as a high profile creator to rely on a child with child level maturity to output content for you, especially online. That being said I'm sure the countless zoomerslop devs which permeate the site now might have a problem with this.

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

@SSj_Ness was defending lolicon in a different thread btw because "muh japanese culture"

I'm sure you can prove that then. I've been telling you to but you, of course, ignore me every time. Drink bleach, lying nigger.

Roblox released long before Minecraft and took up far too much of early zoomers' childhoods.
Roblox developers walked so that Minecraft youtubers could run.

Huh, well, sounds like they're still similar so I'll take that as being half right.