FTC urged to investigate Roblox for allegedly exposing kids to sex predators, misleading public about safety

Two major online safety groups are urging the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Roblox – claiming that the wildly popular video game platform is allowing sex predators to “groom” kids, among other harmful alleged activities.Fairplay and the National Center for Online Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) said Wednesday that Roblox’s voice and text chat features “are a source of substantial harm to children, facilitating predation and abuse by enabling adult contact with minors.”In one shocking incident, a test account created by NCOSE researchers in October and registered to a 5-year-old was “immediately” granted access to “dating, romance and … voice chat experiences where the user could be connected to strangers online.” “Roblox’s design and business model put the company’s interests directly at odds with children’s developmental needs, causing them real-world harm,“ the groups wrote in an 87-page submission to the FTC, a copy of which was obtained by The Post.As recently as February, Fairplay researchers testing under-13 accounts “witnessed the use of sexual references and racial slurs within minutes of entering an experience called ‘ChatSim,” which explicitly advertises in its thumbnail that players can ‘chat without restrictions,’” the report said.According to the report, test accounts encountered users who made references to male genitalia and masturbation.The test accounts were also able to chat with strangers after receiving “connection requests,” though Fairplay said follow-up testing showed that “loophole may now be closed.”The creepy encounters are just one area of concern.

The groups also allege that Roblox uses a “complex virtual currency system” called Robux that manipulates kids into spending huge sums of their parents’ money without their knowledge.Roblox is also called out for allegedly using addictive and gambling-like design features like loot boxes and wheel-spins to get kids hooked.In their...