Roblox: Predators Exploiting Children in Metaverse

Roblox, a popular platform for kids, faces serious issues with predators luring and exploiting children both online and offline.

### The Dark Side of Roblox: Predators, Exploitation, and Inadequate Safety Measures
* 🕹️  Roblox, a popular online gaming platform with **77 million daily users**, has faced numerous cases of child exploitation, including **physical abductions and sexual assaults**.
* 👥  Predators have been known to groom children on Roblox, with some cases involving **registered sex offenders** and others who use the platform to **solicit child pornography**.
* 💸  The platform's virtual currency, Robux, has created opportunities for predators to manipulate children, offering them **currency in exchange for inappropriate acts or relationships**.
* 🛡️  Roblox's moderation system has been criticized for being too lax, with only **3,000 content moderators** compared to TikTok's **40,000**.
* 👩‍⚖️  Controversy has surrounded Roblox's response to child safety issues, including a **$1.6 million lawsuit against a safety advocate** who raised concerns about the platform.
* 👶  Child safety advocates are calling for legislative action to hold companies like Roblox accountable for these harms, while the company itself is focused on **improving safety features and raising awareness**.
* 🚨  One high-profile case involved a popular game developer on Roblox, Arnold Castillo, who was arrested for **kidnapping a 15-year-old girl** after years of **inappropriate interactions with minors** on the platform.
* 🔒  Despite these challenges, Roblox remains **immensely popular among children**, highlighting the ongoing need for **improved safety measures** and **increased awareness among parents and users**.

Social media platforms, gaming platforms, all internet companies have struggled with X-rated content, and trying to protect kids or prevent them from being accessed to it. What's different about this story and this reporting is that we are seeing examples of these cases shifting from the online world into the offline world, where kids are being physically kidnapped, abducted, and sexually assaulted by predators who have connected with them on Roblox. I've seen so many horrible things happen on Roblox. I've seen games that fully simulate sex with penetration with fluids. There's been predators who have traveled to meet kids in real life. There's been predators who have transported children hundreds of miles away to their homes. Roblox has around 77 million daily users, and more than 40% of them are under the age of 13. Anytime you have an audience where it's mostly kids, predators are going to be in there looking for victims to procure.

Who's ever seen a room full of people laying around in their underpants like their avatars? Some really full-on things are happening to kids, and it's subtle the way it starts. What do you remember him saying to you that was bad? I remember he would make jokes like, you know, the younger they are, the tighter the hole. There's predators that will pay children with Robux to do sex acts on camera, and all of this is happening while at the same time Roblox is branding their platform is safe for children. We've got to start thinking about how we do Roblox differently. It's like going to a place rather than playing a game. So this girl just asked if I wanted to be twins, but now she's shooting me with a gun. This gentleman over here ran up to me crying. And then there's also a tiny baby behind him who's also crying.

Roblox is about two decades old, and it launched initially as a platform for kids to learn how to code and create their own video games that anybody could play online with other strangers. Roblox is based in San Mateo, California. It's a publicly traded company that was founded by Dave Zuki and Eric Castle in 2004. It launched in 2006, and Zuki is still the company's CEO today. Anyone can design their own games to put into the Roblox Mall, and users come and they visit all of those games over the pandemic. When kids were stuck at home, Roblox exploded. It attracted 33 million players every single day, and that year by year, it grew dramatically. Based on this momentum, Roblox went public over the pandemic. Today it attracts 77 million people every single day. Roblox is one of the most popular platforms used by children today. Millions of kids are playing inside these games right now.

Send this to your parents. Hello parents. Your child really wants Robux. Roblox is powered by a virtual currency called Robux. Players are able to buy things inside the game with Robux, and these minute transactions add up to billions of dollars in revenue for Roblox every year. It says you need an additional 75 Robux. Roblox takes about a 70% cut of the sale, and the developer of this flower would take about a 30% cut of the sale. Kids beg for Robux from their parents, but that's also created an opening for predators to transfer Robux to kids in exchange for being their friend, or even coercing them to create child sex abuse material. We identified criminal cases linked to Roblox, where predators had met and groomed children through the platform. These cases range from registered sex offenders who gained access to Roblox and found victims through the games on its platform.

to examples where predators
would actually use Roblox as virtual in-game currency to coerce kids into
sending them child porn. In some of these cases, these predators traveled
across the country to abuse kids in real life. One of the most interesting
cases I discovered is that of Arnold Castillo. This was an online predator
who was a very popular developer
of a Sonic Eclipse game that he created on Roblox. Castillo
made tens of thousands of dollars because this
game was so popular, and children loved it so much. In the fall of 2020,
Castillo's game just exploded, and it was towards the end of that year when some sinister
messages had been sending to a 12-year-old girl were leaked online. There was a conversation between you and Arnold Castillo
that was leaked online, and at the time you were 12-years-old. So can you bring us back
to that moment for you? What was it like for you
as a 12-year-old girl?

to be speaking to who you thought was an
adult man in this way? At the time, I excused and justified the behavior because he kept making
a huge, like a point. There's just jokes. This is ironic; we're just joking around. My sense of humor has
always been very harsh. Dark humor, if you will. And while it doesn't excuse
my behavior, it does reveal that I had no intention on moving on any of the things I said. And how did your relationship with Arnold Castillo change over time? It started becoming
pretty inappropriate, like very early on. But
over the years, it got more and more it like more, more and more like he had
ulterior motives, sort of sort of deal, you know? Can you explain what you
mean by ulterior motives? Certain things like
corrupting me beyond, you know, and wanting to
kidnap me. Keep me in his, keep me in his house. Keep
me in his basement, you know.

take me away from my parents, that sort of stuff. When these messages leaked, a number of Roblox users filed complaints to the company. 4 days after those reports came in, Roblox did take action. They disabled Arnold Castillo's account, but he was always one step ahead. He quickly created a new account and transferred the game over to a friend who kept it running. It wasn't until the end of 2021 that these teen gamers took the fight beyond Roblox, straight to Sega in Japan. One of them wrote a letter to the Sega Corporation saying its Sonic, the hedgehog mascot, was being appropriated by a pedophile on the gaming platform, Roblox. Sega actually filed a copyright infringement notice against Roblox, which eventually shut the game down. He was still accessing Roblox up until his arrest by the FBI in May of 2022. Arnold Castillo was arrested for kidnapping a 15-year-old girl.

For you, I mean, some of the messages that he sent you years earlier
were about kidnapping you, bringing you to his home. Yeah, exactly. You know, having sexual relationship with you. So reading about what
had happened to this girl who was abducted and taken
across state lines to his home. How did it feel? I was, I, I was sad. I felt terrible. I was just like, I, I, I Somehow this slipped
under everybody's noses, and somebody else ended
up becoming a victim, and I was starting to speak up about this in
the first place specifically, so people got the full story,
so we could avoid more victims, and that, that broke my spirit, man, that, that just, yeah, yeah. Ultimately, it wasn't Roblox that shut down his Sonic Eclipse game. It was Sega. It was the
intellectual property rights of a corporation that resulted
in that game being shut down, not all the complaints
that these users had made.

to Roblox about child safety. So because these gamers
stopped believing in Roblox's ability to police its
platform, teen vigilantes started policing
the platform themselves. One of these cyber vigilantes
is a famous YouTuber known as Ruben Sim. I think I picked the name Ruben Sim because it sounds like Roblox Ben Simon. I think most of
my viewers would describe me as an anti-hero. I'm very abrasive when it
comes to this type of stuff. I'm not very nice about it. Ben Simon is a controversial figure. He's mocked Roblox employees
for their physical appearance, their sexual preferences. There are also allegations
that he's made homophobic slurs inside games. He was first banned by
Roblox when he was just 17. Inappropriate content on
Roblox is really unavoidable. Back in 2016, I was approached
by a viewer who wanted to tell me about an experience
that their friend had with a predator from Roblox.

The things that I saw were just so terrible. I felt like I had to say something. And so I made a YouTube video about this predator and all the things that he had done. And from that point onwards, I started getting bombarded with messages from other kids and other Roblox users to share their own experiences with predators. There is a community of people who make groups that are disguised as virtual clothing stores, and they choose this disguise because they're trying to attract the highest concentration of little girls as possible. Really making a YouTube video isn't going to do a lot to stop a predator. And so the first thing I usually ask is like, have you told your parents? Have you talked to your local police? A lot of these kids are very embarrassed about situations like these. They're worried that if they tell their parents they won't let them use Roblox anymore, or they'll take away internet access.

And I feel like if I were to
just ignore all of the stuff that's coming in, a lot of
crimes would go unanswered. First things first, can
you say, good morning, Kira. Good morning,
Kira. Good morning. The big, big, big, big thing that I wanted to talk about today is online gaming. 'Cause I know you all
love it, don't you? Yeah. We're going to start off
talking about Roblox. Who in here has been playing Roblox? When someone's asked you
to be their boyfriend or girlfriend who's had that happen? Put your hand up for me.
You're not in trouble. Just put your hand up. Okay. Safe on social is a leading
provider of education and consulting around all
aspects of cyber safety. Safety for children online has
changed dramatically over the last five years because
it's getting younger who's been offered free
Robux to do something

that was inappropriate in the game. Or someone has said, I'll give you some free Robux if you come and follow me on Snapchat or
TikTok, or something like that. Who's had that happen? Okay, loads of you. Roblox is a Metaverse game. I liken it when I'm talking
to students as going to a shopping center. If their parents drop them off
out in front of a great big, huge shopping mall and let them go in and do whatever they wanted for an hour. Running around in all
of those little shops, getting dressed up, and
figuring out who they are and their identity and all of that sort of stuff
can be a whole lot of fun. But at the same time,
there's a whole lot of risk. There might be someone
that asks them to move to another platform,
which is exactly the same as being asked to go and
get in a car with someone. So we need to think about
that as the difference here.

Most social media platforms don't allow kids under the age of 13. Roblox welcomes them. Games that are designed for children like Disney's Club Penguin or Nintendo's Splatoon 2 often just offer canned dialogue options for people who are trying to communicate with strangers. Hello, how are you? Do you want to play this game together? Good job. Roblox is different. Roblox lets anybody, including kids who are four years old, say anything that they want in an open chat. Roblox might censor some things. However, a lot of predators have found ways to circumvent Roblox's moderation systems because it's made for children. The platform does not collect any personal information about its users. That means that all of these avatars that are playing inside this metaverse are anonymous. I have no idea who I'm talking to. That's not abnormal in a lot of video games. You're just sort of talking to strangers and making friends.

and enjoying the gameplay together. It's a little bit
different in Roblox though because kids generally
assume that they're talking to other kids when they
could be talking to anybody. And now, please put your
hands together for the founder and CEO of Roblox, David Baszucki. I just want to highlight what Dan said about
civility on our platform. It really is the foundation
of everything we do. We have a really amazing vision for this, whether it's safety and civility around private
one-on-one conversations, whether it's safety and
civility about big outdoor spaces. What you're going to see from
us is a very flexible, adaptable safety and civility structure
that handles all of this. Roblox's moderation is
quite a controversial topic. It's come under fire in recent
years for being too lax. When you compare Roblox to
other social media platforms, like for example, TikTok,
which employ a workforce

of 40,000 content moderators
who are policing the platform. Roblox, however, has about
3,000 content moderators. The company argues that they don't need as many content moderators
to police the platform. On the surface, Roblox
likes to present itself as a very well-moderated,
well-kept platform. But it's all, can I
swear? Yeah, but it's all -- Roblox has a really spotty history moderating its platform. There are a variety of
ways in which kids are able to engage in social scenarios
that are not accessible to them in real life and
can really bring out some of their worst impulses. There are sex role-play games. There are role-play games
where people are police officers who are killing citizens, and it's a little bit tough
for Roblox to moderate, not just chat, not just items that get uploaded into the game, but the way that people
behave toward each other.

In 2021, the day before Thanksgiving, I woke up to my fans messaging me news articles that the Roblox Corporation
was suing me for $1.6 million. It really ruined my Thanksgiving. It was all I could think
about at Thanksgiving dinner. My first reaction was disbelief. I was like, there's no
way that this is real. The first sentence of the
legal complaint describes me as the leader of a cyber mob. They had accused me of
things like malice and fraud and oppression, and even like making terroristic threats to them. Roblox and I reached a settlement. I created a safety advocacy group called Moderation for Dummies. I made an entire discord
server with a ticket system where people could report stuff and a huge team of volunteers
would comb through it, send the important stuff to me, which I would then post
on the Twitter account, and Roblox would take it down. There have been
several lawsuits alleging that Roblox doesn't do as much as it could.

to protect kids on the platform, and so investors might be concerned that Roblox will suffer
reputational damages that inspire parents to pull
their kids off the platform and thereby decrease its user base. I think when trying to
figure out what the solutions are to this problem, when you
talk to child safety advocates, they may be calling for
legislation to, you know, hold these companies
accountable for these kinds of harms. When you talk to people who
work inside the company, they're interested in
ensuring that the safety tools and features they design are rolled out to children on default. Another obvious solution
would be raising awareness. This call is from a federal prison. To accept this call, press five. To block this call in all future. You may begin speaking
now. Good afternoon. Hi Arnold. Why do you
think Roblox is so popular with children today? Because it's appealing visually. It's really easy to get in

and play any game. The platform is so easily
accessible by for people of any age, whether young or old. And why do you think
this platform is drawing in predators? Because the platform is just
as easily accessible to them as it as it would be to anybody else. I remember people reported
him several times to Roblox, like people besides my mom, and they would always say,
if it didn't happen on our platform, there's nothing we can do. And they're not taking responsibility.

Roblox’s Predator Problem

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Roblox, a popular platform for kids, is facing a disturbing trend of predators shifting from online to offline, kidnapping and sexually assaulting children.

The platform, originally designed for kids to create and play games, has attracted a massive daily user base of 77 million, with over 40% under the age of 13.

Despite branding itself as safe for children, Roblox has become a hunting ground for predators, engaging in explicit and harmful behavior with young users.

The Impact of Robux on Children and the Dark Side of Roblox

Children's desire for Robux has led to predators using the virtual currency to exploit and groom them, leading to criminal cases.

One notable case is that of Arnold Castillo, a popular Roblox game developer who allegedly made tens of thousands of dollars and engaged in inappropriate behavior with a 12-year-old girl.

The girl excused his behavior initially but later realized his ulterior motives, including wanting to corrupt and kidnap her.

The Controversy Surrounding Roblox, Arnold Castillo, and Teen Vigilantes

Roblox faced complaints about a user's predatory behavior, leading to the game's shutdown by Sega due to copyright infringement.

The incident involved the kidnapping of a 15-year-old girl, causing sadness and frustration among users.

Teen vigilantes, including the controversial YouTuber Ruben Sim, took it upon themselves to police the platform due to a lack of trust in Roblox's ability to ensure safety.

The Impact of Online Predators on Roblox Users

A YouTube video exposing a predator on Roblox led to a flood of messages from other users sharing their experiences.

Many kids targeted by predators on Roblox are too embarrassed to tell their parents or authorities.

The game's environment, similar to a virtual shopping mall, poses both fun and risks for its young users, as predators often lure them to other platforms.

Roblox's Controversial Approach to Child Safety

Roblox allows open chat for all users, including young children, raising concerns about safety and moderation.

The platform's minimal personal information collection and anonymous avatars create a potentially risky environment for kids.

With a much smaller moderation team compared to other social media platforms, Roblox has faced criticism for its ability to effectively monitor and regulate inappropriate behavior and content.

The Impact of the Roblox Corporation Lawsuit

6 million lawsuit from the Roblox Corporation, which disrupted my Thanksgiving.

Despite reaching a settlement, concerns about the company's reputation and child safety persist, leading to calls for potential legislation and increased awareness.

The platform's popularity with children and its accessibility are seen as factors drawing in predators, while the company's response to reports has raised criticism.