Sheriff warns the child predators are already inside homes and says platforms like Roblox arent doing anything

LAS VEGAS — When Livingston Parish deputies executed a search warrant at a suspect’s home, they discovered him actively using voice-changing technology to pose as a teen girl while communicating with a real child online— exactly the crime they had come to arrest him for.“He had a 14-year-old girl on the phone, he was basically disguising his voice, and that’s what’s so scary with these devices out there, these apps, that it will have no consequences,” said Livingston Parish Sheriff Jason Ard.“And this kid had no idea they were talking to a 40-something-year-old man.”Investigators say the suspect was actively on Roblox, an online gaming app popular with children, according to authorities.

And the suspect, a registered sex offender, shouldn’t have been using it.Roblox says its platform does not include any kind of voice modulation, but the case is part of the state’s lawsuit against the game company.A statewide crackdown on child sex predators led to the arrest and highlights a disturbing national trend, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill told Fox News Digital last weekend at CrimeCon Las Vegas.“This is not a victimless crime,” she said.“There are children who are being victimized to produce pornography that’s being traded, and there are children who are getting raped and hurt in a number of ways.”She described cases where children are lured from their homes hundreds or thousands of miles away before they are rescued.Murrill said Louisiana is on track to receive 90,000 tips about online child exploitation this year alone, with 30,000 already processed by the end of May.

And police across the state have made hundreds of arrests.In many cases, the parents are blindsided and don’t know what to look out for.“When we all grew up, we always look for the white van, the ice cream truck, things of that nature,” said Ard, who was also at CrimeCon, where the attorney general joined former “To Catch a Predator” host Chris Hans...