ST. LOUIS 鈥 The mother of a 13-year-old 最新杏吧原创 girl says her child was groomed and sexually exploited by a man she met on an online children鈥檚 game, a lawsuit filed Wednesday claims.
The girl met the man on Roblox believing he was a fellow teen. He built an emotional connection in the virtual world, the lawsuit says, then eventually asked her to send him text messages and explicit photos. The lawsuit does not indicate where the man lived.
鈥淭he design of its app makes children easy prey for pedophiles,鈥 the lawsuit says. Roblox 鈥渉ad no appropriate safeguards to ensure that children were in fact safe or that predators were screened.鈥
The lawsuit is the first in Missouri to accuse the company of creating a breeding ground for predators, but such suits have become increasingly common across the country. In recent weeks, similar allegations have been made in Michigan, Louisiana and California.
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Criminal charges also have been filed against some users. Federal prosecutors charged a 42-year-old man in 2020 with trafficking a 16-year-old girl across state lines after targeting her on the app. A 23-year-old New Jersey man was sentenced to 15 years in prison in 2023 for grooming a 15-year-old girl on the app before sexually abusing her. Last year, a 64-year-old man was accused of posing as a 13-year-old boy to groom a young girl and convince her to send explicit photos.
A Roblox spokesman said in a statement the company invests heavily in content monitoring and has implemented safeguards to protect users. The app also offers parental controls to help keep kids safe.
鈥淲e are deeply troubled by any incident that endangers our users, and safety is a top priority,鈥 the statement says.
Roblox was launched in the early 2000s as a new sort of education software. Through simple coding, children could build different worlds and games within the app using their own characters, which they could also customize.
The app exploded during the COVID-19 pandemic, in part because of its chat features. In September 2020, the app had 30 million users. More than half of them were under 13, according to the lawsuit. In 2023, the company reported 68.5 million daily users, with most of them under 17.
Until late last year, the app鈥檚 default settings made it easy for adults to reach out to children even if they weren鈥檛 鈥渇riends鈥 on the app, the lawsuit says.
Now, adults aren鈥檛 allowed to directly contact kids under 13. But the company still does little to prevent young children from creating accounts with older birthdays, the suit says, and kids can still receive friend requests from adult strangers.
The 最新杏吧原创 girl targeted on Roblox had been using the app since she was 7, the suit says. Her mom believed it was safe since it was designed and marketed toward children.
But this year, the girl began speaking with a man on the app. He manipulated her, the suit says, and sent her graphic messages and explicit photos of himself.
As a result, the girl suffers from severe mental health issues, including anxiety and self-harm, the suit says.
The lawsuit, filed by attorneys from three law firms in Chicago, Florida and Washington D.C., seeks an unspecified amount of damages. It accuses the company of fraud, negligence and consumer law violations.
