Roblox Comes Under Fire for Failing To Protect Minors and Misrepresenting User Data
Hindenburg’s report alleges that Roblox has repeatedly inflated its user figure, intentionally using vague language to mislead its investors about how many users it has. The organization also claims to have discovered several cases of sexual abuse and exploitation of minors on the platform, citing incidents involving kidnapping and sexual assault against minors that stemmed from in-game meetings.
Hindenburg’s allegations about misrepresenting user data stem from claims the company has made in its investor communications, citing close correlation between Roblox’s assertion of how many people use its platform and its daily active user count—daily active users could easily be multiple accounts run by a single person or bots from developers on the platform trying to make their content seem more popular. Essentially, Roblox appears to be using intentionally vague language in its investor reports in order to drive up its share price by making the platform look more popular than it is.
Interviews with former Roblox employees also claim that the company apparently has separate metrics for internal user tracking and tracking done for investor reports, and that the internal books track users with multiple accounts, despite Roblox’s insistence to the contrary. According to those interviews, Roblox’s actual user count is as much as 30% lower than it claims at any given time.
In addition to alternate accounts, bots are rampant on the platform. For example, Roblox’s 7th most popular game, Adopt Me!, has garnered over 83,000 Change.org signatures to remove it from the platform due to extensive “botting” that “breaks” Roblox. Roblox’s 2nd most visited game, Blox Fruits, was dominated by traffic from Vietnam, where we found numerous Facebook groups, including 5 with 50,000 to 117,000 members each, advertising and soliciting tools to run 20+ Roblox bot tabs at a time.
The researchers also collected data on Roblox’s engagement across the platform’s top roughly 7,200 games, finding that user engagement was far below what Roblox claimed. It found “millions of “zombie” engagement hours,” logged by what appear to be bots—activity that the researchers found by identifying accounts that spent over 24 hours in the game at a time.
The lengthy report provides evidence of several cases to substantiate Hindenburg’s claims, including a group on Roblox that goes by “Adult Studios” whose 3,334 members were “openly trading child pornography and soliciting sexual acts from minors.” The report also cites data from other organizations that have found that this sort of exploitation of minors is not uncommon on the Roblox platform.
After the report emerged, Roblox responded to the claims in the report in an investor relations post, calling the report misleading, citing its Community Standards and a recent blog post, and shifting the focus to cash flow metrics, rather than directly addressing the inflated user counts.
Hindenburg Research responded to Roblox in a post to X with a video clip containing very damning in-game screen capture clips, seemingly seeking more accountability from the game platform:
Roblox’s response is an abject failure to address the two core allegations in our report, including:
- Evidence that Roblox has been systematically lying for years about the number of people on its platform and their genuine level of engagement.
- That the platform is a pedophile hellscape with no up-front screening, replete with child porn trading rings and prolific sexually explicit content, all available to children.