Lawsuit Claims Roblox Showed Reckless Disregard for Child Safety

Mother says the lack of safety features on both Roblox and Snapchat gave predators “easy access” to her daughter and other children to maximize profits.

According to a new lawsuit, an 11-year-old Louisiana girl was groomed on Roblox and Snapchat by sexual predators who released nude pictures of her to classmates, causing severe emotional trauma.

Her mother filed the complaint (PDF) in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on March 31, seeking to hold Roblox Corporation and Snap Inc. liable for failing to add safety features that protect children, despite knowing predatory adults were targeting them on their platforms, Roblox and Snapchat. In order to maintain their anonymity, the lawsuit refers to the daughter as AW-0002, and her mother as AW-GAL-0002.

Roblox was launched in 2006 as an online gaming platform marketed to children, which allows users to create their own games and servers that they can invite others to experience with them. Players can also interact and communicate through chat features.

Snapchat, which was originally launched in 2011 as Picaboo, is a chat service where users can send pictures, messages and other media that are only available for a limited time.

Both platforms attract millions of users worldwide. However, Roblox has been the subject of hundreds of Roblox child exploitation lawsuits filed by parents and young survivors who allege the lack of adequate safety features has allowed predators to contact and groom children into sending explicit videos, photos or to meet in the real world, which has led to sexual assaults, rapes, kidnappings and human trafficking for years.

In many instances, once the predator felt they had the child adequately groomed, they would allegedly switch the interactions from Roblox to a chat system like Snapchat or Discord.

After facing increasing pressure, late last year Roblox began rolling out facial recognition software, which it says can verify users’ ages and prevent adults from contacting children they do not know without parental consent. It remains to be seen how effective at preventing child exploitation the new features will be.

Roblox, Snapchat Grooming Allegations

According to the lawsuit, AW-0002 began using Roblox when she was only 10 years old. Her mother, seeing Roblox’s marketing, its child-like design and knowing other children used it, believed the platform to be safe for children.

However, her own daughter became the target of sexual predators on Roblox in 2024. Once they groomed the now 11-year-old child sufficiently, they moved the conversations to Snapchat.

One predator in particular, a 19-year-old who called himself “Fidel,” began having video calls with the child. Even after the mother confronted him with her daughter’s age and forbade him to contact her daughter, “Fidel” found other ways to do so through fake accounts and acquaintances.

Eventually, the mother discovered he had manipulated the child into sending topless pictures of herself, which were then shared at her school, causing the little girl to be the subject of ridicule and bullying, resulting in tremendous emotional trauma.

Her mother indicates that Roblox knew this was happening to children worldwide through their platform long before the daughter began using it. However, she argues that both platforms were far more concerned about profit, showing “reckless disregard” for the safety of children it knew were using their apps.

“Had Defendants’ defectively designed apps not provided these predators with easy access to Plaintiff, she would have never experienced this lifechanging abuse. Had Defendants implemented even the most basic system of screening or age and identity verification, as well as other commonsense safety measures, Plaintiff never would have interacted with these predators and never would have suffered the harm that she did.”

– AW-GAL-0002 v. Roblox Corporation et al

The lawsuit indicates the girl suffered “profound harm” as a result of all that has happened, leaving her with anxiety, extreme humiliation, shame and “a fundamental loss of trust” for others. 

It presents claims of design defect, negligence, failure to warn, unreasonable design, negligent undertaking, negligence – failure to warn, fraudulent concealment and misrepresentation, and negligent misrepresentation.

Roblox Child Exploitation Lawsuits

The complaint will be consolidated with similar Roblox child exploitation lawsuits currently centralized in the Northern District of California before U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg for coordinated discovery and pretrial proceedings.

Hundreds of claims have been filed to date, and the litigation is expected to continue to grow in the coming weeks and months. Judge Seeborg is also likely to call for “bellwether trials,” where the parties select and prepare a few cases, determined to be representative of the litigation as a whole, for early trial dates. These bellwether trials are typically used to gauge how juries may respond to evidence and testimony likely to be repeated throughout the litigation.

However, if the parties have not reached a settlement agreement or other resolution after the bellwether trials and pretrial proceedings have concluded, Judge Seeborg would likely begin remanding cases back to their original district courts for individual dates.

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