Lawsuit Claims Roblox, Snapchat, Discord Facilitate Child Sexual Abuse

Teen girl was allegedly drugged and raped twice after a sexual predator discovered she lived nearby and established contact through the popular platforms, according to mother’s lawsuit.

In a recently filed lawsuit, a North Carolina mother indicates that Roblox, Snapchat and Discord allowed adult sexual predators to groom her teenage daughter into sending explicit pics and meeting in person, which led to the girl being raped at least twice.

The mother, who is identified only with the initials AW-GAL-0001 to protect the anonymity of herself and her daughter, AW-0001, brought the complaint (PDF) in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California late last month, seeking damages from Roblox Corporation, Discord Inc. and Snap Inc..

The lawsuit claims that the platforms should be held responsible for the attacks, since they have failed to provide adequate protections for children for years, such as by requiring age verification on the websites, and ignored known problems with sexual predators engaging directly with minors.

First released in 2006, Roblox is a popular online gaming platform that allows users to create games and servers they can invite others to join, which has been heavily marketed towards children. Players can interact and communicate through Roblox chat features, and it is now used by millions of children on a daily basis.

Discord and SnapChat are independent communication apps, which are often used in tandem with Roblox to exchange messages, and participate in audio or video chat.

In recent months, hundreds of Roblox child sexual exploitation lawsuits have been brought by parents and young survivors, indicating that the platform was used by sexual predators, often together with Snapchat or Discord, to target, groom, manipulate and sometimes physically assault children.

On Roblox, the sexual predators frequently disguise themselves as children and groom users into sending them explicit photos and videos, often after transferring the conversation to Discord or Snapchat. In some instances, these individuals have convinced children to meet them, resulting in sexual assault, rape, kidnapping and human trafficking.

Facing increasing criticism, Roblox began rolling out facial recognition software late last year, saying the technology can verify users’ ages and restrict adults from contacting children without parental consent. However, families argue the safeguards came far too late to protect many victims.

According to the mother in this latest lawsuit, her daughter was first targeted on Roblox in 2021, when a sexual predator used the platform, claiming to be a 12-year-old boy from the same North Carolina town. The child was then groomed through the platforms, and ultimately convinced to send sexually explicit images through Discord’s servers.

In 2025, the girl was targeted by another user, a 19-year-old predator who was able to find her through Snapchat’s “Quick Add” feature, which told the adult that the child user was locally based, the lawsuit notes.

This time things went much further, as the girl met with the predator twice, who drugged her and violently raped her both times, according to her mother.

The mother says she never would have let her child use the apps had she known they lacked basic safety features that one would expect from a game that advertises itself as a safe place for children.

“With their pervasive patterns of misrepresentations about safety, Defendants portray their apps as safe and appropriate places for children to play. In reality, and as Defendants well know, the design of their apps makes children easy prey for pedophiles, and Defendants had no appropriate safeguards to ensure that children were in fact safe or that predators were screened.”

– AW-001 et al v. Roblox Corporation et al

According to the lawsuit, the girl suffered severe and permanent emotional and physical trauma that will affect her for the rest of her life.

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

Roblox Child Sexual Exploitation Lawsuits

The claim will be consolidated with similar Roblox child sex exploitation lawsuits in the Northern District of California, where they are centralized before U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg as part of a multidistrict litigation (MDL).

Judge Seeborg is expected to move toward selecting a small group of representative cases to prepare for a bellwether process, allowing the parties to conduct case specific discovery and schedule a handful of claims for early trial dates. These “bellwether” trials are typically used to gauge how juries may respond to certain evidence and testimony likely to be repeated throughout the claims.

However, if the parties fail to reach a Roblox lawsuit settlement agreement or other resolution once those bellwether trials and pretrial proceedings are completed, Judge Seeborg will likely begin remanding cases back to their originating districts for individual trial dates.

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