Iowa claims in suit Roblox exposes children to harm

DES MOINES, Iowa (CN) — Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird accused online video gaming platform Roblox on Tuesday of knowingly exploiting children and putting them at risk of pornographers and adult child predators.

“Roblox is the perfect environment for child predators, pornographers, scammers, fraudsters, online sex rings, and inappropriate content,” Bird writes in the complaintfiled in Polk County District Court in Des Moines.

The suit was brought under the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act in the state’s parens patriae capacity to protect the health, safety, and welfare of its residents.

“We will fight for our children,” Bird said in a statement issued Tuesday. “Roblox created a breeding ground for sexual predators, and Iowa’s children are paying the price. Roblox must either make their game a safe place for children or stop doing business in our state. Parents must be told the truth so they can protect their children online from inappropriate material, grooming, exploitation, and other predatory practices.”

Roblox, a San Mateo, California-based company, operates one of the most popular games in the nation with more than 80 million daily users, including Iowans, and most of whom are children under the age of 18 — some as young as age 4, Bird says in the complaint.

She says Roblox markets itself as the “#1 gaming site for kids and teens” and that as many as two-thirds of U.S. children ages 9 to 12 have Roblox accounts.

Roblox Chief Safety Officer Matt Kaufman said in a statement Tuesday that Iowa’s suit “contains patently false claims” and the company has taken steps to protect children who access the game.

“Roblox is built with safety at its core,” Kaufman said. “We have advanced safeguards that monitor our platform for harmful content and communications. Users cannot send or receive images via chat, eliminating one of the most prevalent opportunities for misuse seen elsewhere online. Safety is a constant and consistent focus of our work, and we are currently rolling out additional measures to further limit who users can chat with.”

Bird acknowledges in the complaint that the company has claimed to be more aggressive on safety issues in response to numerous suits, but she characterizes those efforts as too little, too late.

“Despite knowing about these serious problems for years, defendant has failed to act. It has failed to implement reasonable guardrails and, worse, it has falsely and deceptively advertised its platform as safe for children, repeatedly making misleading statements and material misrepresentations of fact,” Bird claims in the suit.

Bird claims in the suit that child predators use Roblox to obtain and share real child pornography, to groom and extort young children with online currency and ultimately meet them in person to physically abuse them.

In April,police found a missing 10-year-old girl and her pet bird with 27-year-old Matthew Naval, in a strip mall more than 250 miles from her home in Kern County, California, after the two reportedly met and communicated online through Roblox. Her family claims that the online gaming platform is a “digital and real-life nightmare” for children.

Similarly, an Iowa family sued Roblox earlier this year after a Tennessee man was charged with abducting an Iowa teen he met on Roblox, taking her back to Tennessee and sexually assaulting her multiple times. That suit was transferred to the Northern District of California pending action on a motion to consolidate several Roblox child sexual exploitation lawsuits before the Judicial Panel on multi-district litigation.

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