A Cook County father is suing the gaming company Roblox after discovering his 9-year-old son had allegedly been groomed and sexually exploited through the website’s online chat system.
Warning: this piece contains mentions of grooming and child sexual abuse material.
No parent wants their child to meet an adult posing as a minor online. Yet this was the case for a Cook County father, whose 9-year-old son was interacting with someone he believed to be another child but was actually a man. The father is now suing Roblox at the federal level on eight counts, alleging that his son was groomed and sexually exploited.
What is Roblox?
“Roblox itself is basically a platform where various game developers can — sort of — make their own games and release them on the platform,” said Alan Ivanov, a senior at DePaul University majoring in cybersecurity, who has been an active Roblox player since 2014. “Individual developers release their games on this hub, and everyone can connect and play their games,” which cover a wide range of genres, from action to roleplaying to arcade to strategy.
Roblox is an example of a “sandbox game” — a genre which grants players a great deal of creative freedom through its virtually unlimited possibilities. Kids are encouraged to use their imagination, which appeals to children looking for a creative outlet.
According to Roblox’s Metrics and Insights page, the platform averages around 151.5 million daily active users (DAU) with over 7 million games — also referred to as “experiences” — for its players to engage with.
With the abundance of games on the platform, the majority of which are created by independent users, Roblox also encourages socialization between users through its text and voice chat tools. However, as of late 2025, all new and existing accounts on the website are required to submit a photo of their government ID or complete an artificial intelligence (AI)-scanned face check in order to access these communication features.
Given the website’s popularity among children, it inevitably raises safety concerns for parents whose children play on the platform, especially when Roblox’s face scans place younger players in the wrong age group.
Minimal Oversight
Sara Beller of Dolman Law Group, who is representing the Cook County father, said: “This was a devastating situation, one that obviously should not have happened. The child continues to suffer from feelings of depression and anxiety and continuously struggles as a result of what happened. He feels humiliation and shame.”
Beller says she cannot begin to guess how many total potential victims there are, estimating that her firm is investigating close to 2,000 claims currently. Although Roblox has certain safety measures such as age verification, Beller says: “That doesn’t stop the harmful content. It may limit who kids talk to, but doesn’t limit what they see or what the experience (is) in Roblox’s user-generated world.”
According to the pending case, Roblox’s website consistently assured parents — as early as 2007 — that the platform is an “online virtual playground where kids of all ages can safely interact, create, have fun and learn.”
With over 40 million games within the Roblox ecosystem, who kids are interacting with and what these children are exposed to has raised concern. Users can build what they want with little to no oversight, thus enabling explicit material like the Roblox games “Escape to Epstein Island” and “Diddy Party,” according to the lawsuit.
Beller points out that the company places more responsibility on parents rather than making their platform safer, saying: “These safety tools also are optional — not default — so that burden still falls on parents … These safety tools require parents to know not only they exist, but know how to use them, how to turn them on and how to actively configure them … To force that on parents really assumes a level of time, technical knowledge and constant supervision that isn’t realistic for some families. Platform safety shouldn’t perfectly depend on parent monitoring.”
Interaction Between Children and Adults
One of the main appeals of Roblox continues to be its social features. The platform has a voice chat setting, giving users the opportunity to socialize and make friends online. Users must be 13 or older to use voice chat. To verify one’s age, users must upload a valid ID or use their facial age-estimation technology powered by AI.
At its launch in 2006, safe chat features were emphasized regardless of the platform’s simplistic design and limited game library. Throughout the 2010s — especially later in the decade — Roblox became a household name, with the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns in 2020 further boosting its popularity.
In 2025, Roblox had an estimated 200 million monthly active users. For perspective, this is well over half of the U.S. population. Game activity reached an all-time high in June 2025, with more than 251.9 million monthly active users.
Despite being primarily marketed towards children, there are still a number of adult users. Twenty-three percent of users are between 17 and 24, and 18 percent of users are 25 and older. The rest of the users are all under the age of 16.
Challenges of Monitoring
Technology is becoming increasingly common in the day-to-day lives of children and there are many reasons why parents may allow their child to play video games. They are often used as a reward for good behavior or as a distraction to give parents some relief. Additionally, video games can foster social connection and improve problem-solving skills.
Finding a balance between the positive and negative impacts of video game usage can be difficult. Parents often don’t understand the larger implications of allowing their children extended or unregulated screen time.
Samantha Close, an associate professor in the College of Communication at DePaul University, says that video games can create a gap between the child and the parents.
“In the case of video games, often, there can be a divide between the child and the parent, where the child might see something and be like, ‘I’m not sure about this,’ but be afraid that if they tell their parent they’re going to lose access to gaming entirely, because their parent’s going to freak out, right?” says Close.
Communication between parents and their children is key to navigating video game usage and who younger users may be talking to through Roblox’s Direct Message feature.
Until January 2026, adults and children could freely chat online with one another using Roblox’s chat features. Roblox operates and relies on self-reporting age verification, which has often led younger users to create “fake accounts” using fake birth dates to access certain chat privileges.
Roblox’s age verification methods received an update in January 2026, adding AI-driven facial age estimation as a requirement for online chat features. This was introduced as an alternative solution to safety issues online, as age-restricted chat features were verified through a government ID for users 13 or older.
Because of Roblox’s sandbox-style playing experience, concerns have been raised about the potential for an exploitative culture to flourish online. One of the platform’s premier games in 2018, MeepCity, spawned major controversy that year due to the game’s “Parties” feature, which reportedly enabled bad actors to create online strip clubs for other users to join.
According to a Bloomberg article titled “Roblox’s Pedophile Problem,” Roblox’s chief safety officer, Matt Kaufman, rejected the claim of a systemic problem.
“Tens of millions of people of all ages have a safe and positive experience on Roblox every single day,” Kaufman told Bloomberg.
In the company’s 10-K annual report, reporting for 2025 and filed through the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on February 11, 2026, Roblox said: “The success of our business model is contingent upon maintaining a strong reputation and brand, including our ability to provide a safe online environment for our users, many of whom are children, to experience,” highlighting the platform’s acknowledgement of its playerbase consisting primarily of minors.
Despite the company’s awareness of its reputation, experts say that this doesn’t necessarily translate into proper protections being taken to ensure user safety and that government agencies can do more to make sure businesses live up to their promises.
Florence Chee, associate professor and Director of Loyola University’s Center for Digital Ethics & Policy, believes that the notion “everyone can act first and apologize later” is prominent across Silicon Valley and the tech companies which populate the region.
“In the U.S., it’s a very permissive regulatory environment: it’s ‘self-regulation,’” Chee said.“We still need to scrutinize and regulate — to make companies better, more ethical.”
A Roblox spokesperson told the Chicago Sun-Times in a statement that the company “prioritizes the safety of our community” and that its safety policies are “purposely stricter than those found on many other platforms.” Roblox did not respond directly to the allegations in the lawsuit by the Cook County father. Reporters for this story attempted to contact Roblox through the company’s Press Inquiries email, several of the company’s officials’ LinkedIn pages and their customer service phone number. Roblox representatives did not respond to any messages.
Roblox maintains an online web page with safety resources for parents. This page provides materials to set up parent-moderated controls such as content filters, chat options, screen time limits and online spending controls.
Roblox Settlement and Lawsuit Updates
Numerous lawsuits continue to be filed against Roblox with similar claims to the one filed by the Cook County father. Beller notes that the father’s case is just one of many in the Multidistrict Litigation (MDL) based in the Northern District of California, where Roblox and other major tech companies have their headquarters.
As of April 2, the MDL has coordinated 146 lawsuits, up from 115 in February of this year, all of which detail claims that Roblox enables predatory behavior and child sexual exploitation, consolidating the federal cases before one judge who oversees the discovery and litigation phases. The most recent Case Management Conference was held April 22, 2026.
“We’re awaiting pretrial orders from the judge who’s overseeing that MDL, to basically start the discovery phase and litigation phase,” says Beller.
In addition to the MDL, Los Angeles County filed a similar lawsuit against Roblox in late February. According to the press release, the lawsuit was filed by County Counsel Dawyn R. Harrison on behalf of the People of the State of California.
“This is not about a minor lapse in safety,” Harrison said in the statement. “It is about a company that gives pedophiles powerful tools to prey on innocent and unsuspecting children.”
In a statement issued to FOX 11 Los Angeles, Roblox responded saying: “We strongly dispute the claims in this lawsuit and will defend against it vigorously. Roblox is built with safety at its core, and we continue to evolve and strengthen our protections every day,” the response read. “There is no finish line when it comes to protecting kids, and while no system can be perfect, our commitment to safety never ends.”
Even if Roblox eventually faces legal accountability, hesitancy will still exist.
“If this happened to a loved one of mine, I don’t know that that trust [for Roblox] can ever be regained,” says Beller. “Our hope is certainly that there’s some systemic change throughout the platform, so that people who want to be able to make that informed decision, they’re at least able to have the information to do so.”
Recommendations for Parents
In the meantime, smaller-scale precautions can be taken. The UK’s National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) advises parents to work with their children to navigate Roblox safely by exploring the platform and chat settings together, where they can learn about content controls and the chat disable features together. They also recommend that parents make a list of age-appropriate games with their children and to set up spending limits.
More broadly, the NSPCC encourages parents to have ongoing conversations about their online and gaming activity. They recommend open-ended questions like, “What games have you been playing on Roblox recently?” and “What platforms have you been using to play games?”
“Don’t be afraid to have difficult conversations with your child,” says Beller. “Don’t be afraid to educate them about the dangers online, the dangers on Roblox, because Roblox certainly isn’t telling parents or anyone.”
To report online child sexual exploitation, use the electronic Cyber Tip Line or call 1-800-843-5678. The Cyber Tip Line is operated by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in partnership with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.
Header Image by Noemi Romero
Be First to Comment