Nebraska Attorney General Mike Hilgers has lodged a damning lawsuit against popular online gaming platform Roblox, accusing it of becoming a “playground” for pedophiles and predators, all while misleading parents about the safety precautions taken.
Children under 13 using the platform can access digital strip clubs, “Epstein’s Island” — where “fictional underage sexual activity takes place,” Sean “Diddy” Combs experiences, and other wildly innapropriate content for minors, the suit alleges.
Hiding behind anonymous avatars, predators have used the massive gaming platform, with some 151 million daily active users, to groom minors and lure them with in-game currency called “Robux.” After pressuring children to do inappropriate acts, those predators will blackmail them, according to the suit.
“Parents deserve the truth,” Hilgers told The Post in a statement. “Roblox has built a multibillion-dollar business on the trust of families, all while creating a playground for predators and exposing children to graphic and dangerous content.”
“Our office will not tolerate companies that endanger kids and mislead the public.”
Hilgers is seeking damages and for the District Court of Adams County, Nebraska to enjoin Roblox, a platform that launched in 2004, from continuing to carry out “unfair, deceptive, and misleading conduct” in the Cornhusker State.
The state AG is specifically alleging that Roblox, a massive platform for user-created games whose popularity soared during the COVID-19 pandemic, violated the Nebraska Consumer Protection Act and the Nebraska Uniform Deceptive Trade.
Those state laws restrict misleading business practices.
His team points to how Roblox repeatedly assured the public that it has taken “every reasonable precaution” to protect children and that it is safe for minors all while failing to “implement basic safety controls” and actively concealing “substantial dangers.”
“Nebraska consumers have suffered injury: they have paid for Robux and subscriptions under the false safety assurances, lost the benefit of promised protections, and faced risk/harm to child users,” the suit says.
A spokesperson for Roblox told The Post that the platform is “built with safety at its core, and we strengthen our protections every day.”
“While we share Attorney General Hilgers’ commitment to keeping kids and teens safe online, we are disappointed that he is choosing to file a lawsuit that fundamentally misrepresents how Roblox works. Roblox is built with safety at its core, and we strengthen our protections every day,” the spokesperson said.
“We prohibit user-to-user image and video sharing, utilize rigorous filters to block personal information from being shared, and enforce global age-based settings that limit younger users to chatting with peers by default,” the spokesperson added. “We take swift action against those found to violate our rules, and work closely with law enforcement to support investigations.”
There are more than 6.4 million experiences for users on Roblox and while the platform leaves it to game developers to create most of those digital environments, it retains control of whether to issue content warnings, whether to impose age restrictions on them, and have to manage user complaints, the suit notes.
Hilgers’ team flagged numerous issues with Roblox’s safety measures, including how its “artificial intelligence-powered age verification system, collapsed into a glaring and dangerous failure” last year.
The AI system placed adults in childrens’ chat groups and vice versa. Beyond that snafu, there are “widely publicized” methods of bypassing Roblox’s age verification systems, according to the suit.
“This matters because Defendant has intentionally marketed Roblox to pre- teen children. It has advertised it as the ‘#1 gaming site for kids and teens’ and an educational experience,” the lawsuit explained.
“To this day, Roblox continues to market to children, because children are Roblox’s core user demographic.”
A “basic search” for “adult” found a group on Roblox with 3,334 members “openly trading child pornography and soliciting sexual acts from minors,” a study cited in the suit found. Tracking those members led investigators to an even larger group of 103,000 engaged in similar sexual crimes.
The latest lawsuit out of Nebraska recounts deeply disturbing experiences that Roblox users went through.
In one instance, a Nebraskan in Adams County alleged that at the age of 15, an adult posing as a 14-year-old in a housingthemed game, arranged an in-person meeting with him and brought him into adult’s their home and sexually assaulted him.
Last May, federal prosecutors in New York busted Tony Rodriguez, 40, for possession of child pornography and using Roblox to reach out to minors for sex. His victims included 11- and 13-year-old girls.
Alarmingly, Roblox has been used by the sinister nihilistic child exploitation network “764” to groom vulnerable children.
In February of last year, a 16-year-old girl committed suicide after a campaign by acolytes of “764,” a group of sick and depraved people who attempt to coerce minors into self-harm and sex acts.
“Although the family used parental monitoring tools and periodically supervised her activity, the victim’s father said he did not understand the extent of Roblox’s social and messaging functionality or the risks it posed to children,” the lawsuit explained.
The grooming campaign against her appears to have begun on Roblox, but migrated off platform, which is a common practice for online predators.
Roblox has faced dozens of lawsuits from users, states and counties accross the countries on similar grounds to the new Nebraska suit, including from Texas, Louisiana, Los Angelos County, Florida, Kentucky and elsewhere.
“Roblox continues to prioritize protection for child predators over our children. Instead of ensuring kids are safe on its platform, Roblox continues to implement half measures and weak protections for minors,” Alleigh Marré, executive director of American Parents Coalition, which has been sharply critical of Roblox said.
“This platform has unlimited reach and has put countless children in danger,” Marré added. “We will continue to support public officials who are working to protect children and keep parents in the driver’s seat of their children’s lives.”
