Relatives of a Clark County girl alleged in a recent lawsuit that the online gaming platform Roblox facilitated a “hunting ground for child sex predators.”
The complaint, filed Friday, alleged that the game’s lack of safety and age verification measures enabled grooming and off-platform sexual exploitation of the girl, who used the system as an 11-year-old.
Roblox spokesperson Chloe Srivastava said Thursday that “criminal behavior has no place” on the platform.
“While no system is perfect, we continue to evolve and strengthen our protections every day,” the emailed statement said in part.
The lawsuit alleges that while playing Roblox in 2024 the girl was contacted by a man who posed as a teen boy during a game called “Chained Together.”
They kept messaging, and, over time, the man “encouraged secrecy” between the two and “worked to isolate her from other friends and support,” the girl’s attorney, Christian Morris, wrote in the complaint. The man then shifted their contact to text messages, where he pressured her into sending sexually explicit images, videos, and messages, the lawsuit stated.
“Defendant’s app and design choices directly enabled the predator’s access to Plaintiff and created the conditions under which he was able to groom and exploit her,” the complaint said.
Roblox Corp. was incorporated as a Nevada on May 30, 2025, according to the secretary of state’s online database. The video gaming company shifted its incorporation from Delaware — long favored by many Fortune 500 companies — to Nevada, joining other major corporations, such as Sphere Entertainment Co. and TripAdvisor Inc.
This was a legal, not physical, move, as companies can change their state of incorporation without moving operations.
Roblox, which was launched in 2006, had 82.9 million daily active users in 2024. Of these, 20 percent are under age 9, 20 percent are between ages 9 and 12, and 16 percent are between ages 13 and 16, according to the lawsuit, which called the game the most downloaded globally.
Roblox previously agreed to implement safeguards and pay Nevada $12.5 million after the Attorney General’s office investigated the app in 2024. Roblox had disputed the claims but agreed to settle.
The corporation pledged to spend $10 million over the next three years to fund youth recreational programs and another $1 million on an online safety awareness campaign in Nevada.
In September, another family also sued Roblox, saying that it had put profits over safety, leading to a 12-year-old boy becoming addicted to the game.
Age verification still ‘fundamentally flawed’
Roblox does not require users to verify their age when creating an account, allowing them to frequently falsify their birthdays, the complaint said.
Srivastava noted that since January, the platform has required all users to undergo age checks to chat in the game. This month, they said, they will also launch new “age-based accounts” that automatically place young users in a partitioned environment.
Still, the lawsuit described the new implementation as “fundamentally flawed” and easily undermined, stating that the AI facial recognition used for verification misidentified minors as adults and vice versa. Furthermore, lawyers in the complaint claimed that eBay listings offering pre-verified Roblox accounts for minors were being sold for as little as $4.
”Roblox knowingly deployed a flawed safety system on 150 million users, fully aware it would not work as promised,” Morris said. “These age verification measures are token gestures, adopted only after years of harm and public scrutiny, and they fall far short of what child safety requires.”
Morris said the girl’s family filed a police report against the man but was unsure whether the criminal matter had been resolved.
“I am proud of them for being willing to come forward,” Morris added. “Victims think that they are alone, but they are not.”
Contact Akiya Dillon at adillon@reviewjournal.com.
