The popular online gaming platform Roblox, which hosts millions of user-created games, is being sued by families and state attorneys general who claim online predators can groom, extort and exploit kids they meet on the platform.
Steven, a father of two, is among those who have filed lawsuits as his family tries to rebuild their life after his son was allegedly targeted.
He said that allowing his teen son to play Roblox seemed like a safe bet — at first.
“I set up every parental control I could find and did the best I could,” he told CBS News in an exclusive interview, asking that CBS News only use his first name for privacy reasons.
But despite the platform’s parental controls, an alleged sex offender posing as a 16-year-old befriended his 13-year-old son in the popular “Pet Simulator” game, according to the lawsuit. Steven alleged the predator offered his son Roblox gift cards in exchange for sexually explicit photos, which his son sent via Discord – a separate gaming and chat platform.
“At a certain point it was, ‘tell me what your address is’ and when he said no, he’s like, ‘Well, I have these photos of you, I’ll tell your parents,’” Steven said of the interaction between the predator and his son. “He was 30 feet down the hall from us and just— felt too trapped to … come and talk to us.”
It was “pure luck,” Steven said, that he found out — because of a threatening message from the perpetrator that allegedly popped up as he was replacing the screen on his son’s phone, which had cracked.
The person has since pleaded guilty to first-degree felony child endangerment.
Lawsuits against Roblox, Discord
Steven’s family is among dozens of families, as well as attorneys general in Kentucky and Louisiana, who are suing Roblox and other tech platforms, alleging they allowed sexual predators access to their children.
Kentucky announced a lawsuit against Roblox last month, and Louisiana filed a suit against the platform in August.
“For years, Roblox has ignored this crisis so it could continue turning a profit,” Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman said in a statement. “Our responsibility is to protect Kentucky children from online exploitation by these predators and the companies like Roblox that knowingly facilitate it.”
Steven said his family is suing Roblox as well as Discord, an instant messaging and social platform, because “at the end of the day, the thing they seem to care about the most is the bottom line, their profit.”
“It almost feels like they’re a haven for … predators, pedophiles, dangerous individuals and like they should do better,” he said.
Steven’s attorney Alexandra Walsh, with the firm Anapol Weiss, is currently investigating hundreds of cases of child endangerment and grooming that allegedly started on Roblox.
“Roblox was the gateway. Roblox is the site that … in this case that gave this predator, this very dangerous man, the ability to find a target and groom this child,” Walsh said.
Steven has moved his family across the country to have a new start as he supports his son through depression and PTSD, he said.
“This thing happens so much faster than you can ever imagine,” Steven said. “You want to believe that like … you’ve done everything you can and that it’ll never happen to me and I thought the same thing until it did.”
Roblox and Discord respond
Matt Kaufman, the chief safety officer at Roblox, said the platform does not allow image sharing in filtered chats and has rolled out over 100 new safety features this year, including age estimation and increased chat monitoring.
“We have safety systems that are in place by default and a lot of these situations that you’re talking about, like extortion, people sharing, graphic images, they simply cannot happen on Roblox,” Kaufman said.
Until recently, Roblox did not verify players’ ages. By the end of the year, all users will have to pass its checks to communicate within the platform. According to Roblox, these checks will include “a combination of facial age estimation technology, ID age verification and verified parental consent.”
Currently, any communication between adult users and those between 13 and 17 is prohibited, unless a real life confirmed relationship can be proven.
“For users 13 to 17 who confirm their age through Facial Age Estimation, adding a Trusted Connection, whether a peer or an 18 or older user, requires an existing real-world relationship, verified by a QR scan or Contact Importer,” Roblox says on its site.
Roblox’s chief safety officer Kaufman said the company has caught and self-reported 23,000 incidents of potentially harmful content to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children so far this year.
“What’s really important about these cases that we report is: we report when we see signs of something that doesn’t look safe,” Kaufman said. “Any platform of our size … it draws bad actors and our job is to do the best that we possibly can to prevent anything from happening on our platform and to report those situations as quickly as possible.”
Discord told CBS News it won’t comment on pending litigation, but said in a statement that it is “deeply committed to safety,” and works to “prevent the spread of sexual exploitation and grooming.”
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