YouTuber Accuses Roblox of Ignoring Child Grooming Allegations; Faces Backlash After Banning Predator Hunter

A YouTube creator from Texas, known as Schlep online, claims that he was groomed on the popular children’s gaming platform Roblox at the age of eight. A well-known developer allegedly sent him sexually explicit and disturbing content, manipulating him to such an extent that he attempted suicide. Now 22, Schlep says his mother reached out to Roblox for help after the incident, but was ignored.

Since then, Schlep has dedicated himself to combating predators on Roblox. With over 120 million monthly active users, including a significant number of preteens, monitoring the platform is an immense challenge. Over the past two years, more than two dozen individuals have been accused of abusing or abducting victims they met or groomed using Roblox, according to Bloomberg’s report from last year.

A recent lawsuit against Roblox alleges that it enabled the sexual exploitation of a 9-year-old boy from Georgia and describes the platform as a “hunting ground for child sex predators.” This lawsuit is just one of nine filed against Roblox this year.

Schlep’s YouTube channel has garnered 620,000 subscribers. His videos feature sting operations that have led to the arrests of six different U.S. men accused of sending explicit messages to decoys they believed were minors. He works with controversial hunter groups like EDPWatch and Predator Poachers to meet and confront these individuals. Schlep says he either coordinates with local police or calls the authorities once the sting is underway.

In his most recent viral video, which has amassed 2.7 million views, a member of Schlep’s team pretended to be an underage girl to chat with a man from Central California. In June, the man agreed to meet who he thought was an underage girl at a local park. Schlep and fellow YouTuber JiDion of EDPWatch, with 4.3 million subscribers, were there to greet him instead. Schlep called the local police, and the man was arrested.

Last week, Schlep received a cease-and-desist notice from Roblox Corporation, which accused him of participating in “unauthorized and harmful activities,” including engaging in simulated child endangerment conversations and directing users to move conversations off the platform. All of his accounts on Roblox were closed, some of which he had since he was eight, and he was informed he could not create any more.

Roblox’s chief safety officer, Matt Kaufman, published a blog post on the company’s website about its moderation policies and cooperation with law enforcement. The fourth section addresses vigilantes, which Roblox defines as “groups or individuals violating our policies to entrap users or otherwise self-police the platform.”

“Any account, including those of vigilante groups or individuals, caught violating our policies will face consequences up to and including removal and banning, where warranted,” Kaufman writes. Schlep believes that the blog post was released in response to his videos.

Schlep has been hailed as a hero by some online communities, with the hashtag #freeschlep trending for several days. “Schlep deserves a fucking medal for the shit he’s done to stop these monsters” writes one user, while another states, “It’s sad to see how Roblox is treating him when he is the one who is making the platform a better place.” However, Roblox Corporation, the $91 billion public company that owns and operates the platform, has taken a different stance.

We reached out to Roblox for comment, but they did not address Schlep’s allegations directly, instead referring back to Kaufman’s post. A representative stated, “It’s important to speak with the right sources to really understand how vigilante individuals and groups operate (e.g., violating policies around sharing PII [personally identifiable information], engaging in sexual conversations, lying about their ages, etc.), all while having a profit motive to evade detection instead of providing companies like ours with all the information to take the necessary action.”

In response to the public outcry, Kaufman published a lengthy response. “More recently, vigilante activity evolved,” he writes. “Instead of just reporting on safety issues, vigilantes started impersonating children and actively sought to connect with adult users. Those conversations mimicked inappropriate behavior and actively encouraged other users to connect on other social media and messaging platforms—thus bypassing Roblox’s own safety systems.”

The Roblox platform is divided into thousands of different games that can be created by anyone, including “condos” designed for erotic roleplay. After our interview, Schlep shared a few servers for us to explore the issue firsthand. Within minutes of joining, multiple users asked in public chat to “freak” or “condo” over private message. When a user wrote, “I’m a minor, pls don’t touch me,” another responded, “U gotta tell them ur old they like kids.”

Schlep says he has sent information about predators he’s found to Roblox through its moderation systems, creating tickets as the company recommends. However, he feels that his work often falls on deaf ears. The cease-and-desist letter “is the first real contact that they’ve ever given me,” he says. “If they opened the line with me, they would directly be acknowledging the predators on their platform. And them doing that is in itself an admission that their site isn’t safe.”

Benjamin Simon, who focuses on Roblox’s moderation problems on his YouTube channel Ruben Sim, points out that “vigilantism is where you take the law into your own hands.” However, he clarifies that Schlep is not attempting to arrest predators himself but instead reports them to the police.

Predator hunting content in general is a controversial subject online. The prototype of this format, To Catch a Predator, was cancelled in 2008 after NBC settled a $105 million lawsuit with the family of a sting target who died by suicide. Since then, dozens of amateur predator hunters have taken their activities into the real world, with three-quarters of states having had online predator stings according to USA Today.

Schlep has faced criticism on legal grounds before. In March, a 20-year-old man was arrested in Virginia after Schlep and JiDion met him at a local library. However, Schlep maintains that he follows the law during his sting operations. “I view this as kind of a David and Goliath situation,” he says. “I am peeling [back] the curtain of what is really going on, and I am definitely upsetting some of the people at Roblox.”