Problems at Roblox (RBLX) #5
Today’s investigation by The Bear Cave presents evidence that Roblox (NYSE: RBLX — $26.8 billion) hosts school shooting games on its platform, has potentially played a role in causing mass shooting events, continues to facilitate large amounts of child abuse, and is structurally broken when it comes to child safety. In addition, an 87-page whistleblower document obtained by The Bear Cave shows that Roblox’s developers admit the site is not safe for children with one developer calling the platform’s content “brainrot” and another warning of the “criminal underworld of Roblox.” After reviewing the evidence, The Bear Cave concludes that Roblox is a national outrage waiting to happen.
The Bear Cave never bets against the companies we write about and has no financial position regarding Roblox stock. If you are a Roblox whistleblower and would like to get in touch please email edwin@585research.com
These findings follow extensive reporting by The Bear Cave over the last few years on child safety and other issues at Roblox, all available below:
“Problems at Roblox (RBLX)” (February 3, 2022)
“More Problems at Roblox (RBLX)” (February 17, 2022)
“Even More Problems at Roblox (RBLX)” (August 17, 2023)
“Problems at Roblox (RBLX) #4” (October 3, 2024)
In July 2024, Bloomberg also published an investigation titled, “Roblox’s Pedophile Problem” and last week Hindenburg called the company “A Pedophile Hellscape For Kids.”
Let’s dig in.
Roblox’s Chief Safety Officer claims the platform is “one of the safest online environments for our users, particularly the youngest” and the company proudly discloses it “[conducts] a safety review of every uploaded image, audio, and video file before these assets become available on our platform.”
We are unconvinced.
The Bear Cave has identified several school shooting games and mass shooting attempts connected to Roblox.
For example, one user uploaded a game called “Carbine” that allowed users to role-play a school shooting as the shooter. The game appears to reference the Columbine High School Massacre and lets children on Roblox shoot classmates in a school cafeteria with a 30-second countdown clock until police arrive.
You can watch a user play through the Roblox school shooting game here. One prominent Roblox commentator and YouTuber, Schlep, even noted that the gun in Roblox was a replica of the gun used in a real past shooting.
This is no isolated incident — school shooting games permeate the Roblox ecosystem.
In another incident, a young child does school shooting role-play in the popular Roblox game Brookhaven. In a clip reviewed by The Bear Cave, the child first starts as a student trying to avoid the shooter by hiding behind the bleachers. Once found, he screams “Run” and leaves the gym, escaping alive. The child then regroups, opens his item bag, chooses a semi-automatic gun, and reenters the school as the shooter.
This is no new issue. Three years ago, Daniel Kelley, a Director at the Anti-Defamation League, tweeted about several Roblox games imitating the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings:
And when Roblox made an online university for its developers it somehow inadvertently used a digital replica of Columbine High School. Roblox later made changes.
The Roblox-enabled school shooting community has real-world implications.
On May 14, 2022, an 18-year-old white nationalist began shooting African-Americans in a Tops Supermarket in Buffalo, ultimately killing 10 Black shoppers. According to one NBC News reporter who reviewed the shooter’s manifesto, he mentioned being radicalized by Roblox games multiple times and “directly ties an interest in nationalism and guns to playing Roblox.”
On May 24, 2022, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos shot and killed 19 students at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. According to a PBS report, Ramos “collected articles about the Buffalo, New York, supermarket shooting” that occurred 10 days earlier and played Roblox with a student at Robb Elementary and “elicited from him details about his schedule and how lunch periods worked at the school.”
In September 2023, Roblox canceled the last day of its own Developer Conference after “a security concern.” According to Roblox Wiki, the conference was canceled after a prominent Roblox developer threatened security at the event. Police later found “a firearm, a high-capacity magazine, and armor-piercing ammunition in his car.”
In May 2024, a 14-year-old student was shot dead outside of Mount Horeb Middle School “after bringing a Ruger .177 caliber pellet rifle” to the school and trying to enter. The student had followed and interacted with a prominent Roblox YouTuber leading up to the incident (the YouTuber was not accused of any wrongdoing). In his manifesto, the student said he enjoyed playing Roblox.
Also in May 2024, an adult man was arrested after interacting with three ten-year-old girls on Roblox. The man allegedly solicited nude photos and threatened to shoot up their school, Barwell Road Elementary. Police alleged the man “had once displayed a firearm by showing it in front of his face.”
And last month, a 17-year-old girl in Connecticut was arrested after “being involved in several bomb and ‘swatting’ threats to local schools and places of worship.” Police said the teen “is also part of a violent online group known as ‘764’ that targets children on messaging and gaming platforms, like Roblox and Discord, to extort them into recording or livestreaming acts of self-harm, producing child sex abuse material, harming animals, murder or other violent acts.”
Roblox also facilitates large amounts of child abuse. The Bear Cave has a live list of Roblox child abuse cases available here.
That list just got longer. Yesterday, an independent group called “Predator Poachers” caught yet another pedophile from Roblox. The group had previously caught three pedophiles on Roblox, all were later arrested.
The sting operation involved the YouTuber Schlep posing as a 15-year-old girl on Roblox and talking with a 25-year-old man. They initially met in a Roblox game and later moved off-platform to Discord.
He was confronted on a YouTube livestream titled, “Catching a Roblox Predator IRL.” The predator was trying to meet the 15-year-old girl in a park after sending photos of the back of his car with blankets and a message, “19 hours left to chill with u irl”
The Roblox predator mentioned that Roblox has “a lot of weird people on there, that’s all I have to say.” He was arrested yesterday on the livestream. The predator’s account joined Roblox in 2013, had 165 “friends,” and is archived here.
Part of the reason Roblox is so dangerous for kids is because it largely revolves around connecting strangers with chat capability. A video earlier this month by Schlep titled, “Roblox's Most Disturbing Games” highlights multiple inappropriate games on Roblox including “Ro-meet” which has the tagline “talk to strangers” and has been played over 210 million times since its 2020 launch.
The game puts two random players in a chatroom and either can refresh to be matched with a new player.
The game was effectively a clone of “Omegle” an app that connected teens randomly to Facetime with each other. Omegle naturally facilitated a lot of inappropriate interactions and was “forced to shut down by a lawsuit from a sexual abuse survivor.”
Roblox is now replicating that experience with a younger audience.
Any large platform will have bad incidents happen, but Roblox is structurally worse for a variety of reasons.
First, Roblox only requires a username and password to sign up, not an email or phone number. (This is because many Roblox players are so young they often don’t have a phone.) This practice means any predator banned by Roblox can easily make a new account – there is no friction in thinking of a new username, but there is a lot of friction in getting new phone numbers.
Second, Roblox’s userbase is incredibly young with about half of users under the age of 13, some as young as six. Younger users can be more easily influenced and, because Roblox falsely portrays itself as a safe platform, parents let their guard down.
Third, Roblox has an in-game currency, Robux, that leaves children even more easy to influence.
If a predator contacts a 9-year-old on Instagram and offers them $100 for inappropriate photos, that money doesn’t do much for the child. But that same 9-year-old might be influenced by 1,000 Robux (~$10) because they really want to buy the latest virtual item. Robux gives predators an easy way to influence children.
Fourth, Roblox has deficient moderation. Beyond inappropriate games, Roblox’s in-game chat filters easily be circumvented.
On Roblox, you can’t type a phone number (e.g., 212-111-1111) but you can spell it out (e.g., two one two…). You can’t type the phrase “my Discord is…” but you can say “my iscord is…” or use the disc emoji. Likewise, you can’t type “Snapchat” but you can type “snappy” or use the ghost emoji.
Fifth, it is easy for predators to pretend to be younger on Roblox. On other platforms like Instagram, it takes effort to pretend to be a younger user. You need to consistently post photos and have a coherent identity. On Roblox it’s frictionless for a 45-year-old to pretend to be a 15-year-old, just make an avatar, chat with other players, and say you are 15.
Above all, any open chat between strangers, an integral part of many games and the Roblox experience, will always pose extreme risks.
The solutions to many of these problems are easy: require a phone number to sign up, require 18+ users to provide ID and minors to provide parental ID, invest more in U.S.-based human moderators, and disable any open chat for minors. Each of these changes could be done quickly but will either stall growth or increase costs.
Many Roblox investors seem blind to these risks.
Following the Hindenburg report, Jim Cramer highlighted the disparity between Roblox promoting itself as a “safe place” and the dangerous behavior on the platform. Mr. Cramer said, in part,
“This is so the opposite of what David [Roblox’s CEO] has said to me over and over and over again, that if true would be a major scandal. Major scandal. Because this is the safe place [for] your kid.” (2:01)
One Roblox investor, Ross Gerber, has called Roblox “the safest platform I let my kids on.” And a partner at Altos Ventures, a major Roblox investor, claimed Roblox could be “1,000x safer than any real-world playground.”
Roblox’s own developers seem to disagree.
A whistleblower recently provided The Bear Cave with an 87-page document containing a thread where Roblox game developers and employees talk about the platform’s safety. The August 2024 chat asks, “Is Roblox really safe for children?” and begins,
“Hey everyone, I’ve been on Roblox for a while now. I know there have always been moderation flaws (some that I have complained about on here), but lately, I’ve started to worry that Roblox is becoming less and less suitable for kids and is allowing developers to actively advertise inappropriate content within their games.”
The document has hundreds of comments and was reviewed by The Bear Cave in its entirety.
Below are some of the conversations at Roblox about child safety:
“Is Roblox safe for children in its current state? No.” (Page 10)
“The underage account will be recommended less games that are inappropriate… But since most children lie about their age while signing up, this does not matter.” (Page 11)
“These type of NSFW content are unavoidable in Roblox, and anyone will come across this after a little digging into the Roblox community. This issue is not just in Roblox, but rather in all games where users can make their own games within that game… So no, Roblox is not safe for children, and probably will never be.” (Page 11)
“Nope, Roblox isn’t a safe platform for children like they originally set out to be.” (Page 17)
“I believe they need to automatically rate these games for older audiences, if not, you know, removing them entirely. I could keep going on about this issue, but it’s just beating a dead horse at this point.” (Page 17)
“If Roblox had to manually approve every new game or change their flow in any way you’ve suggested, there would be no platform to complain about.” (Page 21)
“Roblox got banned for bad moderation; Turkey banned it to ‘protect children,’ and they are not wrong. The amount of visits from 10 of these games is, in summary, 100 million+. I don’t want to know how many of these children have seen nudity or even developed a p*rn addiction. But that is a big problem with Roblox doing almost nothing to prevent it.” (Page 22)
“The problem is Roblox is advertised as a platform for children and safe for children. The whole world is dangerous for children. But if I take a kid to a for children event, there shouldn’t be a rope walk over a pit of sharks.” (Page 22)
“No real change will be made unless a massive number of big developers or userbase does something about it that affects their profits and shines light on it. This might be the 1250th post about moderation issues, Roblox simply has shareholders to answer to.” (Page 27)
“Moderation is complete buns. And to answer the question, no, this isn’t safe for children.” (Page 31)
“The question is: When was Roblox ever safe for children?” (Page 34)
“I mean to be fair it’s really just brainrot.” (Page 35)
“No. Roblox is not safe for children. The amount of NSFW I see on this platform on a daily basis is unbelievable. I’m surprised COPPA [Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule] hasn’t taken any action.” (Page 35)
“However, after joining just a HANDFUL of groups, I was met with a BARRAGE of friend requests all charged for one purpose, to be a, for lack of a better term, freak. So to answer your question, no, Roblox is NOT safe for kids, imagine your daughter, or your son, joining these groups just for fun, and then being sucked into this essential criminal underworld of Roblox. Turkey was right to ban the platform when there are groups that I joined that have been up for months, and even years at a push.” (Page 37)
“Roblox doesn’t care about children…” (Page 41)
“Dude, delete this post before Roblox sues you.” (Page 49)
“No. Roblox isn’t safe for kids under 13 years old…” (Page 58)
“It would be nice if parental controls included blocking developers, kind of like YouTube allows blocking. I monitor my child’s YouTube and I know what games are played on Roblox. Roblox doesn’t give parents any control to block experiences that have age recommendations, or at least I am not aware of them.” (Page 60)
“The issue is that this doesn’t hurt their bottom line. They’re not going to do anything unless it goes mainstream… As you’ll find with any publicly traded company, they put their investors first and their community second.” (Page 66)
“It wasn’t even safe before then. The 18+ games back then, exploiters using 18+ scripts, people like MisterObvious (exposed in 2017), etc. However, it definitely got worse with the pandemic. The platform today is more predatory than it was back then to a much larger scale.” (Page 71)
“Yeah, I agree with you the game is not safe for children.” (Page 72)
“Roblox wasn’t safe for kids when I first started, and it isn’t safe for them now.” (Page 73)
“Unfortunately, it is worse now due to Roblox’s moderation being so abysmal and Roblox being a far more widespread platform. Creeps flock aplenty when before the creep:kid ratio was much much lower… Roblox has no interest in actually fixing the issues so long as the bad press doesn’t end up viral.” (Page 73)
“Roblox isn’t even doing the bare minimum… the reason people complain about it is because of this, every website will have its bad apples, but I kid you not I’ve seen more inappropriate content on this so-called kid friendly site than anywhere else. Roblox would rather tank into the ground than to actually do anything.” (Page 80)
While these comments focus on safety, others in the Roblox community have raised concerns about how Roblox has cut corners to temporarily boost its revenue.