Roblox attempts to bar child predators as short sellers target the popular game platform

Roblox is one of the world’s biggest gaming platforms and it’s aimed squarely at kids. But critics say it hasn’t done enough to protect millions of users from child predators.

“Over the years, people have raised concerns about a lack of guardrails or safety settings on the platform,” says Bloomberg investigative reporter Olivia Carville. “They've pointed to criminal indictments where individuals have been arrested after connecting with children through Roblox.”

Those criticisms again made headlines this month after Hindenburg Research, a short seller that profits from betting against companies, called the game a “pedophile hellscape.” Roblox Corporation strongly objected to the Hindenburg report, stating that, “Roblox has a robust set of proactive and preventative safety measures designed to catch and prevent malicious or harmful activity on the platform.” The company’s stock price wobbled but largely recovered, and independent analysts proved skeptical of Hindenburg’s claims that Roblox inflated its user counts to deceive investors.

Worries over Roblox and social media dangers to children remain, however.

“You're seeing lawsuits filed across the country alleging child safety concerns on these big platforms that attract children,” says Carville. “Congress, the courts, child safety advocates are really calling out for more protections for kids in this space.”

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Carville investigated child sex abuse on Roblox along with Bloomberg video game reporter Cecilia D’Anastasio earlier this year.

NPR reached out to Roblox Corporation for a comment and received this statement from a Roblox spokesperson:

“While we are deeply troubled by any incident that endangers a child, tens of millions of users have safe and positive experiences every day and abide by Roblox’s stringent Community Standards. For instance, of the more than 36.2 million reports to NCMEC’s CyberTipline in 2023, Roblox was the subject of less than .04 percent. We are proud of our strict policies against unacceptable content, behavior and communication and deploy an expert team of thousands of moderators and automated detection tools to take swift action to remove content in violation of these policies when detected. For example, rigorous text chat filters block inappropriate words and phrases, we do not allow user-to-user image sharing and our filters are designed to block attempts to direct under-13 users off platform and prevent the sharing of personal information such as a phone number or address. Safety has always been critical to everything we do at Roblox and we have invested heavily in it since our founding nearly 20 years ago. We take our goal to create a safe and civil platform very seriously and are always evolving and enhancing our safety approach — in constant partnership with child safety, media literacy and child development experts — working to prevent and catch harmful activity.”

How does Roblox allow its players, kids and adults, to interact with one another?

“Roblox is a pretty incredible space. I didn't know much about it before I started investigating or reporting on this story. And the more I came to learn, the more impressed I really was by how the platform is set up.

“As you go into Roblox, imagine you're in a shopping mall and each individual shop is like a game, but each shop or each game is actually created and built by the users themselves. Not only does it have 80 million people playing on a daily basis, but it has 13 million different games. And I'm talking games like ‘go explore a haunted house’ or ‘learn how to fly; or ‘build a tower’ or ‘adopt a pig’ or ‘make slime.’ It also is a social media platform. What I mean by that is users can actually talk to one another, live in real time inside the game. So you can type as you're chatting inside the game and Roblox actually processes 50,000 chat messages per second. That's how big it is.”

But everyone is anonymous on the platform — potential predators and kids alike?

“What's unique about Roblox is this gaming platform was designed for children, so they wanted children to come and play. And still today, around 40% of the user base is under the age of 13. The reason why everyone is anonymous is because Roblox cannot legally collect personal information of children and it knows that.

“So because they can't collect kids' names, email addresses, phone numbers, it just says, ‘Don't give us that information.’ It takes less than 60 seconds to create an account on Roblox, and you don't have to give them a name or an email address. You play anonymously.”

You investigated one convicted child sex offender who used this anonymity to solicit young girls. What happened?

“Doc or DoctorRofatnik, as he was known inside Roblox — his real name was Arnold Castillo — was recently arrested for kidnapping a 15-year-old girl, transporting her across state lines. He actually ordered an Uber and paid an Uber driver $1,000 to transport her from Indiana to his home in New Jersey. And she trusted him because he was a very successful game developer on Roblox. Within the Roblox world, kids look up to game developers like God.

“I went into the Otisville Federal Correctional Institute to meet Arnold Castillo in person. I also had multiple phone calls with him throughout the course of this reporting. He did show some remorse for his actions, but he largely blamed it on his upbringing and said that he didn't understand where the line was effectively. He felt like he was in a relationship with some of these young girls that he was communicating with. I think one of the most interesting things about my conversation with Arnold was about how he used or exploited and abused Roblox the platform. And he was telling me that pedophiles and predators are drawn to the platform because it's so easy to create an account.”

You also found more cases of child sex abuse that even involved bribing kids with virtual game money, right?

“So, throughout the reporting, we use the Freedom of Information Act to gain access to police documents to see where roadblocks had been used by predators or pedophiles to connect with children. And in some of those police reports, we're looking at registered sex offenders who got on the platform and re-offended and reconnected with children, in some cases kidnapping them and sexually assaulting them in real life.

“Where was one transcript that we saw that we quoted in the story where a registered sex offender was talking to an 8-year-old girl, and he was encouraging her to send naked photos to him. And he was paying her Robux, which is the platform's in-game virtual currency. And there's one trick, one specific message where she replies and she says, ‘anything for Robux.’

“Kids really want this virtual currency to play this game. And she was willing to send a stranger naked photos to get access to more Robux. And I think that, you know, parents need to know this, especially because CEO Dave Baszucki is aiming to reach 1 billion daily active users. Right now, they have 80 million. So, they're really trying to grow. And as you grow, it gets harder and harder to moderate the platform. So, looking forward, parents really need to know what the risks are and what they're comfortable with their children doing.”

How do users feel about the company’s ability to moderate the platform?

“I think one of the more fascinating parts of the reporting in the story was meeting a lot of the young gamers who kind of turned vigilantes or rebels, pointing out Roblox’s safety failures. There was one in particular named Ruben Sim, and he has a YouTube following of 1.2 million people, and he really only posts about predatory behavior on Roblox. That's how he's grown his platform to become so big and that's how he has such a big following, is highlighting predatory behavior within these games and pointing out where he thinks the company has failed to protect its youngest users.

“Where's actually a kind of a cottage industry or a large number of YouTubers or gamers who do like pointing out how Roblox has in their eyes allegedly failed to keep young users safe.”

James Perkins Mastromarino produced and edited this segment for broadcast with Micaela Rodriguez. Perkins Mastromarino also adapted it for the web.