The Nature of Roblox
You might be wondering why your child’s favorite online gaming platform, Roblox, is facing hundreds of lawsuits for endangering children. The answer, unfortunately, is not as bright as the “obbys” (obstacle courses) your child loves. With a net worth of nearly $49 billion, Roblox is one of the biggest games marketed to youth out there. Roblox could be a fun platform for games like “obbys,” dress-up, pizza shops, gardens, and hide-and-seek. But sadly, it also allows predators to exploit children.
Roblox is a playground for predators. It fails to protect our children from child sexual exploitation and sextortion.
Before we dissect how predators on Roblox target children, we must understand the game itself. First, Roblox itself is not the game. Roblox is a platform that hosts over 5,000 games, ranging from scarier “manhunts” to colorful obstacle courses, fashion shows, escape-room-esque challenges, survival games in the wild, and more. These games are uniquely created in a trademark Roblox style and played by avatars/characters.
Importantly, parents must be aware that players are rarely themselves in this online world. The 19-year-old female writer of this blog had a Roblox avatar in middle school: a male rockstar with shiny sunglasses and bleached blonde hair. You can never know who you are actually playing with unless you manually invite your friends’ usernames to a specific game. Parents must understand Roblox as an alternate and anonymous universe. Predators on Roblox can easily pose as children.
In addition to letting users create multiple personas, users can also buy “Robux,” the game’s currency, with real money. Roblox has an active in-game economy of buying and selling items that is essential to “levelling up” in a game or passing a certain stage. This is a key financial element predators often use to exploit children, which we will discuss in the next section.
How online “Robux” leads to offline Sextortion by Predators on Roblox
Game currency itself is not designed to be harmful. However, when paired with Roblox’s negligence in protecting children and its ineffective safety measures, Robux becomes a problem.
According to Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, in February 2026, 29-year-old Justin Adkins was charged with sexual exploitation and coercion of a minor. Adkins first approached the young victim in 2024. He exchanged phone numbers on Roblox, then moved the conversation to Snapchat, a social media platform where messages can automatically disappear. Adkins allegedly groomed the victim into thinking that they were romantically involved. Then, he coerced the victim into sending explicit photos and instructed the victim to recreate adult pornographic material. Adkins used gifts like a new iPhone and Robux to manipulate the victim into creating and sending hundreds of explicit videos and photos (Child Sexual Abuse Material or CSAM for short).
A year before this tragedy, in April 2025, Attorney General Uthmeir began a child-safety investigation into Roblox. He emphasized that online platforms are a “place where a stranger, an adult in another state, can get access to your little girl.”
Roblox Chat Features: The Voices of Predators
There are two key features on Roblox: chatbox and voice chat. Before January 2026 (for more details, see the end of the blog), the chatbox was open to everyone of all ages. A key feature of Roblox is its “whisper” or private chat. This lets players message each other directly, so others can’t see the chat.
According to the Social Media Victims Law Center (SMVLC) in 2020, an adult named Charles privately messaged a 9-year-old girl called S.U. He then encouraged her to move their conversation to Discord. In July 2020, another Roblox user named Matthew used his power as an “in-game moderator” to manipulate S.U. into giving him Robux. He moved their conversation to Snapchat, where he pressured S.U. into sending sexually explicit photos. S.U. suffered severe mental distress and attempted suicide multiple times.
In November 2021, Roblox enforced age-verification (must be 13+) for voice chat features. Before then, anyone could use the “spatial voice” or voice chat feature to communicate with players in games. Hypothetically speaking, predators could have pitched their voice higher to trick children into thinking that they were communicating with a peer from across the world. Even after November 2021, nobody could technically stop children from taking a picture of their parents’ passports to bypass the age-verification software. This would let them unknowingly play games with predators.
One might ask, what about Roblox parental controls?
Predator’s Control beyond “Parental Controls”
In September 2025, Rebecca Dallas, the mother of Ethan Dallas, sued Roblox and Discord. She claimed their alleged “lack of guardrails” allowed her son with autism to be “sexually coerced by an adult predator into sending explicit photos.” Ethan was a Roblox user since 2015. Tragically, he died by suicide in 2024 after enduring severe sexual exploitation. Ethan’s parents set up parental controls to limit his game time and approve friend requests. But a boy named Nate, who was really 37-year-old predator Timothy O’Conner, showed Ethan how to disable some of those controls. As conversations escalated and exploitation intensified, O’Conner ultimately coerced Ethan into sending explicit photos through third-party platforms like Discord.
Parents need to know that kids can be pressured into sharing their Discord usernames in Roblox chats. This can lead to dangerous chats with predators outside the game.
Many people are unaware of the harmful impacts of Roblox’s lax safety guardrails that go beyond cyberspace. In April 2025, a 27-year-old man named Matthew Macatuno Naval was arrested for kidnapping a 10-year-old girl. Naval initially approached the girl on Roblox, then moved the conversation to Discord. Subsequently, Naval groomed and manipulated the girl into sharing her home address. Then, on April 13th, 2025, Naval abducted the girl from her home in Taft, California. Similarly, 2000 miles away in Iowa in May 2025, an adult predator approached a 13-year-old on Roblox. The predator groomed the child and then kidnapped her from her grandmother’s home. He then trafficked her across multiple states, where she was repeatedly sexually abused and raped.
To combat child sexual abuse, in 2024, Roblox introduced “Roblox Sentinel”, an Artificial Intelligence system that detects “early signals of potential child endangerment, such as grooming, allowing us to investigate even sooner and, when relevant, report to law enforcement.” In June 2025, Roblox admitted that Sentinel helped them submit 1,200 reports of potential child sexual exploitation including “attempts to circumvent our filtering mechanisms and other safeguards” to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).
More Cases of Predators on Roblox
In August 2025 in Missouri, another lawsuit was filed against Roblox for “creating a breeding ground for predators and enabling sexual exploitation of a 15-year-old boy.” The predator pretended to be a young girl and established trust with the victim, identified as John Doe. He sent Doe sexually explicit photos of young girls, then coerced Doe into sending sexually explicit photos of himself.
Similarly, in November 2025, a mother from Ohio filed a lawsuit against Roblox. She claimed that it failed to protect her son from grooming and sexual exploitation. In 2024, the victim, identified as John Doe, was allegedly approached by a predator pretending to be a peer on Roblox. The predator groomed the victim into trusting him. He sent sexually explicit photos of himself, and then attempted to manipulate Doe into doing the same. Due to the predator’s threats to harm Doe’s family if he refused to send sexually explicit photos of himself, Doe eventually complied with the predator’s demands out of immense fear.
These are just a few examples of the hundreds of lawsuits filed against Roblox and other third-party platforms like Discord and Snapchat. Additional protection mechanisms like Roblox Sentinel (see above in Predator’s Control beyond “Parental Control”) have helped report CSAM. However, they do not reverse the immense damage done to hundreds of families by predators on Roblox over the decade. Our next blog discusses the legal technicalities of the ongoing Multi-District Litigation against Roblox.
What can you do?
Parents, please closely monitor your child[dren]’s gaming activities. Children, do not talk to, give to, or receive things from strangers. If you have to play Roblox, only interact with your most trusted family and friends. For tips about online safety and how to talk to your children, visit our How Parents Can Fight Back Against Online Abuse page. For educational programs, fact sheets for children and parents about online safety, and reporting resources, visit our Internet Safety Resources section.
Read Part Two of this blog, which goes into detail about the Multi-District Litigation, here.
Who We Are
ENOUGH ABUSE® is the nation’s oldest citizen-based child advocacy organization, with a 6-decade history of improving the lives of vulnerable children. We work in states, nationally, and with international partners to ensure every child’s right to a childhood free from abuse and exploitation.
For over two decades, our primary focus has been to prevent the sexual abuse of children in their homes, communities and online through our effective prevention trainings, education and advocacy.