A detective knocked on a Philadelphia mother’s door in April 2024 to deliver horrific news. For months, her 12-year-old daughter was preyed on by a man she met on the popular video game platform, Roblox.
Her daughter joined Roblox in 2021 when she was 9. She befriended a user who portrayed himself as a minor, later convinced her to download Snapchat, and coerced the then-12-year-old to send him explicit photos and videos of herself. When she pushed back, he threatened to release the materials online.
The mother sued the company behind the game, one of a growing number of lawsuits accusing Roblox, and other popular gaming platforms, of inadequate safety features that puts children in harms’s way by exposing them to predators and inducing gaming addiction.
Fortnite, an Epic Games product, and Microsoft’s MineCraft are also wildly popular among children, and face lawsuits accusing them of design features that spark addiction.
Roblox faces the most serious allegations.
The virtual metaverse to which developers add games, called experiences, has tens of millions of daily users. More than a third are under 13, according to the company, which is valued at over $90 billion and touts child safety on its website.
More than 30 lawsuits nationwide accuse Roblox of leading predators to minors, said Alexandra Walsh, an attorney with the Philadelphia-based law firm Anapol Weiss. The firm is not involved in the suit involving the 12-year-old girl, but has filed similar cases and is investigating hundreds of others, including in the Philadelphia area, Walsh said.
Some attorneys told The Inquirer that parents reached out to them in the past year with complaints, but others began investigating Roblox following news reports on exploitation that began on the platform.
The focus of the lawsuits against Roblox is design features — or lack thereof — that facilitate abuse and the company’s claim that the platform is safe for children, the attorney said.
For example, Roblox doesn’t require age or identity verification in its sign up process, which takes seconds. And in some cases, Walsh said, registered sex offenders created accounts portraying themselves as kids.
“If you’re operating an online platform that you tell parents is a safe place for your kids to play online, at a minimum, you should have some kind of check in place to make sure that you’re not letting registered sex offenders onto your platform,” Walsh said.
A Roblox spokesperson said in a statement that the company can’t comment on specific cases, but it is deeply troubled by any incident that endangers users.
“At Roblox, safety is a top priority and we are continually innovating new safety features — over 100 this year alone — that protect our users and empower parents and caregivers with greater control and visibility,” the statement said.
A Snap Inc. spokesperson similarly said in a statement that the company continues to make it more difficult for predators to find and interact with young users.
Internet gaming disorder
The sexual abuse lawsuits aren’t the only type of cases against Roblox.
A growing number of lawsuits accuse the gaming platform, alongside popular games Fortnite and Minecraft, of design choices that keep children playing to the point of addiction. The lawsuits say the games incorporated features that induce internet gaming disorder, which is a recognized condition by the American Psychiatric Association. The disorder diminished children’s social interactions and academic performance, and led to bursts of anger when removed from the games, the suits say.
At least six such lawsuits against Roblox, Microsoft, and Epic Games are pending in federal court in Philadelphia.
Like the sexual-exploitation lawsuits, the addiction complaints say game developers market their products as safe for children, with features for parental control. But that’s not the case, the suits say.
“They create the illusion of parental control,” said Adam Gomez, an attorney with Grant & Eisenhofer who filed three such lawsuits in Philadelphia.
Epic Games and Microsoft did not respond to requests for comment.
A spokesperson for the Entertainment Software Association, the video game trade association, said in a statement that developers incorporate “easy-to-use tools for players, parents and caregivers to manage numerous aspects of gameplay.”
“Claims that say otherwise are not rooted in fact and ignore the reality that billions of people globally, of all ages and backgrounds, play video games in a healthy, balanced way,” the statement said.
Playing house with a predator
The Philadelphia child’s story highlights the ease at which Roblox’s safety features can be circumvented.
The girl played family role-playing experiences with the man who ultimately bypassed a feature meant to stop users from taking conversations off the platform, coerced her into sending the explicit images, and threatened to release them.
The girl “was then stuck in an endless cycle of abuse — one she could not stop out of fear of her life would be left in shambles,” according to the lawsuit.
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The detective told her mother the perpetrator was a Texas man who was facing charges in Utah.
Melissa Hague, an attorney with the Joel Bieber Law Firm representing the family, said that Roblox is akin to letting children attempt to dodge cars on a highway as a game.
“But instead of cars it’s pedophiles,” Hague said.
Other lawsuits tell similar stories, including one filed last week in the Camden County Superior Court against Roblox and Discord, another social media platform that allows users to share files and has faced lawsuits, including from New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin. The Camden lawsuit says the child was victimized when she was 11 by an adult man who said he was a young boy.
A Discord spokesperson said in a statement that the platform requires all users to be at least 13.
“We maintain strong systems to prevent the spread of sexual exploitation and grooming on our platform and also work with other technology companies and safety organizations to improve online safety across the internet,” Discord’s statement said.
Roblox has rolled out new safety features since 2024. These include limits for how users under 13 can communicate and updated parental controls.
“While no system is perfect, Roblox is designed with rigorous built in safety features, and our policies are purposely stricter than those found on other platforms, including limiting chat for younger users, not allowing sharing images through chat and filters designed to block the sharing of personal information,” a Roblox spokesperson said in a statement.
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Walsh said that the “jury is still out” on whether the safety updates are sufficient, but if her children were young teens, “no way in hell would I allow them on Roblox.”
What’s next for Roblox in court?
The Anapol Weiss attorney asked a federal court panel to consolidate the sexual exploitation cases against Roblox under one district judge in California.
Gomez, representing clients in gaming-addiction lawsuits, similarly asked for the cases against Roblox, Fortnite, and Minecraft be consolidated in Philadelphia. The filing says that there are 17 cases pending in five states, with six active cases in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania
But regardless of how the cases are litigated, they are expected to face a hurdles, attorneys said.
Roblox has argued it is immune from the lawsuits by a 1996 law that protects internet publishers from third-party speech.
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But the Philadelphia mother’s complaint says the lawsuit doesn’t seek to hold Roblox and Snap accountable for third-party content. Instead it faults the companies for producing “dangerously defective products.”
A second hurdle is Roblox’s terms of use. When signing up, users agree to “waive any right to a jury trial” and instead go through confidential binding arbitration. The company asked judges to enforce the provision.
Walsh said Roblox is “trying to silence” children who have been sexually exploited.
“If Roblox wants to defend its conduct here, they should,” the attorney said. “But they should do it in open court and in public and in front of a jury.”