• by Colin Kirkland , April 14, 2025

Despite a range of recently launched child-safety tools, virtual gaming platform Roblox, which is especially popular among young people, may be a dangerous platform for children. New research from insights agency Revealing Reality depicts “deeply disturbing” evidence of adults easily preying on underage users. 

The research, originally reported on by The Guardian, provides videos and photos of Roblox activity involving Revealing Reality’s child-registered accounts being pursued by adult users in ways that the platform effectively allows. 

“An account registered as a 42-year-old could and publicly interact with our accounts registered as children as young as 5 years old and privately chat with accounts registered as 13 years old and above,” the agency writes, citing recordings of the in-app activity. 

In another example, an account registered as a 10-year-old was about to partake in “highly suggestive environments,” including what appears to be a Roblox bordello filled with private rooms and characters dressed in sexually suggestive outfits. 

“In these spaces, children were able to both observe and participate in conversations that often strayed into adult themes,” the agency explains. 

As of November, Roblox responded to reports of child predators utilizing the platform’s chat feature, no longer allowing users under the age of 13 to communicate directly outside of gameplay. The update also included “remote management” for parents over their children’s in-game activity. 

However, Revealing Reality has highlighted an unfortunate loophole. These recent safety updates still allow registered adult accounts to add child accounts as “friends” with the ability to invite them to join different games and start conversations in the game’s public chat board. 

In other words, “adults and children can easily interact in the same virtual spaces with no effective age verification or separation.”

Roblox has also begun applying age-specific content ratings to its in-game experiences, barring users under 9 years old from all content rated “Moderate” and up, but granting access to “Minimal” and “Mild” experiences.

But this new research shows that the ratings system may not be accurate. For example, a bordello-type environment titled “Boys and Girls Club Roleplay,” hosted by a topless avatar, has a “Mild” content rating.

As Revealing Reality points out, Roblox’s age-based safety features only work if the users involved tell the truth about their age when registering an account.

The platform, however, “lacks robust age verification methods to do this,” allowing for the potential of public text chats, voice chats, private chats and suggestive “emotes” taking place between adults and underage users.

For example, there is nothing to prevent adult users from creating a child-aged account and freely communicating with actual children on the platform -- and if certain details are shared, off the platform as well.

“While Roblox censors messages that may indicate the asking and sharing of contact details, we’ve seen users apply easy workarounds,” the agency says. “Insta becomes ‘1n sta’, Snap (as in Snapchat) becomes ‘S nap’.

The agency also discovered Discord servers involving nude images being sold in exchange for Roblox’s virtual currency, Robux. 

These findings showcase the same fears and concerns included in previous lawsuits, reports and parental complaints against the platform. 

In 2020, Roblox boasted that half of the children in the U.S. were active on the platform. Last year, about 40% of Roblox’s 85 million daily active users were under age 13. 

The information provided by Revealing Reality will likely be impactful to brands that are currently advertising on the platform, or are curious about utilizing Roblox’s recent ad updates such as video ads, and a programmatic buying framework powered by supply-side platform Pubmatic.

At the start of this month, Google expanded immersive ads to more publishers across AdMob and Ad Manager on Roblox, streamlining implementation for app publishers in video formats, 2D and 3D.

Marketers' ability to easily buy immersive Roblox ads caused the gaming company’s stock to immediately rise 2.5%.

As more brands flock to Roblox, drawn by its appeal to and targeting of Gen Alpha and Gen Z users, the company’s inability to deal with its child safety issues may result in major brand suitability issues.  

In reaction to Revealing Reality’s report, the company publicly deflected responsibility, stating that “there are bad actors on the internet” and that this is “an issue that goes beyond Roblox and needs to be addressed through collaboration with governments and an industry-wide commitment to strong safety measures across all platforms." 

In this way, the company’s ability to deal with child predators has yet to improve or change since November, when Bloomberg – which called the platform “an X-rated pedophile hellscape” – interviewed current and former Roblox safety moderators, who said that the company was inundated with far too many child-safety reports to clear each day. 

In other words, Roblox is losing the battle regarding child safety on its platform.