The Roblox Problem
Despite hundreds of lawsuits, the gaming giant continues to demonstrate how far it will go to silence victims and advocates dedicated to preventing child harm.
The massive child predator problem on Roblox is no longer a secret. Presently, hundreds of people are suing Roblox – an online gaming platform marketed to children – claiming the platform falsely advertised its services as safe for children and made itself complicit in widespread child exploitation, grooming and abuse. As of June 2026, over 150 individual child-safety lawsuits have been consolidated in federal litigation in California.
A number of state governments have also filed consumer protection lawsuits against Roblox in recent months. Roblox reached multi-million dollar settlements with Alabama, West Virginia, and Nevada and still have active lawsuits in Texas, Florida, Nebraska, Kentucky and Tennessee. These lawsuits allege Roblox deceived parents by touting their product as safe and kid friendly.
In reality, child predators have long viewed Roblox as a safe haven and a rich victim pool. They swim like sharks throughout the gaming platform, hunting for vulnerable prey. Among them, members of the vast child exploitation and extortion network known as 764. The 764 network has been mentioned in state-filed lawsuits against Roblox, and the connections are corroborated in criminal complaints of the 764 members who have been arrested.
These criminal complaints continue to be unsealed on a regular basis.
In May of 2026, the DOJ unsealed a criminal complaint against 20-year-old Levi Stoner, an alleged member of the 764 network who was recently arrested and charged in Pennsylvania. The DOJ alleges Stoner used Roblox to find young victims before luring them to platforms like Instagram and Discord, where he extorted them for violent and sexual content, including videos of them self-harming and torturing animals.
Stoner instructed one of his minor victims to kill her dog on camera. He told his minor victims that he wanted to sacrifice them for 764, which he described as an accelerationist group meant to “speed up the tide of death” and “reset the world.”
In April of 2026, the FBI announced the arrest of 24-year-old Ryan Catello of Ravena, NY on child exploitation charges. Catello victimized at least 2 minor girls, grooming them and offering them Robux (Roblox’s in-game currency) to perform sexual acts on camera before escalating to threats and extortion to force the girls to produce more illegal material.
In February of 2026, 24-year-old Landen Westfall of Athens, Alabama was arrested and charged with a whopping 261 counts of indecent behavior with a juvenile, 15 counts of possession of child sexual abuse material, and 2 counts of assisted suicide. The FBI alleges Westfall used Roblox to groom a girl and draw her to other platforms where he sexually exploited her, coerced her to self-harm and take her life on video under threats of harm. While 764 isn’t called out in the press release, it fits the MO neatly enough to make involvement in Com/764 highly likely.
Also in February of 2026, two young sisters in Florida, ages 12 and 14, were kidnapped by a user they met on Roblox and then continued to communicate with on Snapchat. The girls were located and rescued and their kidnapper, a 19-year-old from Omaha Nebraska named Hser Mu Lah Say, was arrested and charged with kidnapping.
In December of 2025, the DOJ announced the arrest of 19-year-old Cayden Newberry of Johnson City, TN on 3 counts of federal child exploitation. Newberry used Roblox to groom his victims and in one case, persuaded a young girl to give him her address, then used DoorDash to send her a phone that she could hide from her parents.
He then instructed the girl to download Discord and began extorting the girl, demanding she carve the username “Caden” into her body and send sexually explicit photos to him and his other 764 friends, threatening to come to her home and harm her if she didn’t comply.
In November of 2025, 20-year-old Erik Madison from Baltimore, MD was arrested on several counts of child exploitation. The DOJ alleges Madison used Roblox to find minor victims and then offered them Robux to cut themselves and create illegal content for him before escalating to threats and extortion.
One of Madison’s victims alleged he demanded she kill her dog on video and threatened to harm a different dog when she refused. Another victim was ordered to perform violent and sexual acts via Discord live chat with Madison and other members, who threatened to harm her family members and swat her house if she refused.
The Roblox class action lawsuit out of California specifically calls out a 764 member known as “Repent”, who used a “Dollhouse Roleplay” game to groom and sexually exploit a 14-year-old victim. The predator used Roblox to target the girl, who he invited to a Discord server and coerced to send sexually explicit images of herself. He then extorted her into repeatedly cutting herself on camera, writing “Repent” on her walls in blood, and more horrifying things. He threatened to rape her or make her kill her pets if she refused to comply.
The lawsuit also names other predators who are very likely part of 764 or an associated online predator group, and notes that several people were arrested thanks to the girl and her mother going to the FBI.
One high profile case in Canada resulted in the death of 16-year-old Penelope Sokolowski, who was groomed and exploited by a 764 member known as “Culprit” who has yet to be apprehended. Penelope’s father, Jason, alleges that she was groomed by the predator on Roblox and ultimately driven to suicide. Penelope started using Roblox when she was only 7 years old.
Roblox’s PR department has been in overdrive attempting to convince both state governments and concerned parents that it is dedicated to improving child safety, but their actions speak louder than words. In August of 2025, Roblox banned a well-known content creator named Schlep, who was known for using Roblox to catch predators and get them arrested. Accompanying the ban was a cease-and-desist letter admonishing “vigilantism” on its platform.
In the subsequent months, Roblox took even more steps to thwart the progress of advocates and investigators who have taken it upon themselves to prevent child harm and raise awareness about the danger. Most recently, Roblox announced it will be doing away with Global User IDs, moving towards a system that assigns each user a User ID unique to each game they join.
Roblox advocate Ruben Sim spoke out strongly in the wake of the announcement. Sim has worked tirelessly for the past two years building a system called “EASI”, a moderation tool that allows Roblox game developers to keep predators and other problematic users out of their games. The system relies on the Roblox Global User IDs to ensure cross-game moderation and ban lists are possible. So, for example, a researcher like myself could locate a 764 member on Roblox, send in the User ID, and get the user added to a ban list to ensure they cannot enter games where children are playing.
By removing Global User IDs, Roblox has broken this moderation system and prompted a storm of backlash by safety-conscious users, who claim the change has no discernible benefit or purpose other than preventing “vigilantes” from taking matters into their own hands.
Back on the lawsuit front, Roblox is back in the hotseat for aggressively using binding arbitration clauses in its Terms of Use to force the 150+ child-safety and sexual exploitation lawsuits out of open court and into closed-door proceedings. The victims and their families are fighting this push, and several federal judges have attempted to block the move.
One thing is abundantly clear – Roblox is fighting hard against those who seek justice.
Curious how my investigations into the 764 network led me to Roblox? Learn more here:
Is there any information as to what happens to these minors after their horrific ordeals? Are they going into psychiatric treatment, being given some type of counseling, etc.? I would imagine they would be, but the reason I ask is untreated trauma of this extreme nature often results in the victims becoming victimizers themselves. We see this all the time with generational trauma within families; the picture is rather less clear in cases of deliberate grooming and abuse of minors by strangers. The fact that all of the abusers seem to be male and the victims seem overwhelmingly to be female no doubt has its role in this dynamic as well, whatever that looks like. And again, thank you for all that you do.