Those that follow Florida government on social media have likely seen several pieces of content put out by Attorney General James Uthmeier announcing his subpoena of the video game Roblox based around the targeting of children by predators on the game.
We are issuing criminal subpoenas to Roblox, which has become a breeding ground for predators to gain access to our kids. pic.twitter.com/vcyTVnkrxU
— Attorney General James Uthmeier (@AGJamesUthmeier) October 20, 2025
His campaign has also run 2026 ads getting people to join his email list messaging around the subpoena.
Cecilia D'Anastasio covers game culture and industry for Bloomberg. She conducted an investigation into how child predators groomed children on the platform before Uthmeier started his messaging. WFSU’s Tristan Wood spoke with her about it.
Wood: For people who didn't read, or some people who don't know that what Roblox is or understand, talk a little bit about what your investigation and what it found?
D'Anastasio: So, Roblox isn't just a video game. Roblox is an online universe where 151 million people, primarily children, are spending hours of their time every single day. Roblox is full of millions upon millions of games. It's like a mall for games where kids can, you know, raise unicorns from babies, or fight with swords or climb big towers and even just stand around and socialize and role play being in high school or running a shop, it's increasingly a place where children are connecting with each other, learning more about themselves, and also where predators have discovered they can meet kids and groom them.
Wood: In your investigation, what was some of the strategies that they would use to like groom children?
D'Anastasio: In our investigation, we saw posts on dark net forums describing tactics that predators use to find and groom children, and on Roblox, one thing that we saw was that some would pretend to even be children, befriend them and move conversations off of the Roblox platform onto places like Discord or Instagram or Snapchat, where the conversations would continue and get more personal. Another tactic we saw was predators offering children Robux, the virtual currency used to purchase digital items in Roblox in exchange for sexual favors. That was something that we saw in several investigations from law enforcement into predators who would actually kidnap these children or meet them in real life.
Wood: Since your story garnered national attention, I know a lot of people have talked about it. The Attorney General James Uthmeier in Florida. He issued a subpoena related to Roblox, and he's been campaigning a lot as he's gearing for election in 2026. I saw digital ads that he put out, talking about how Roblox is targeting children. Have you noticed a trend of politicians nationally, kind of campaigning on that issue? How are politicians responding to this problem?
D'Anastasio: Florida's attorney general is just one of several who is increasingly paying attention to child safety on Roblox. We've also seen attorneys general from Texas and Louisiana and Kentucky who have issued subpoenas or filed complaints against Roblox in the last couple of months
Texas's Attorney General accused Roblox of quote, unquote, flagrantly ignoring state and federal online safety laws while deceiving parents about the dangers of its platform. So, nobody has been mincing words about this.
We have seen since August 15, when Louisiana's Attorney General sued Roblox, accused the platform of not protecting kids. In the two weeks prior to that, I counted seven other complaints filed against Roblox over child predator issues.
Since then, more has been filed. These are just from people who have used the platform or have children who have used the platform, and sometimes in these suits, the co-defendants include other platforms like snap or like discord, where we have seen at Bloomberg, predators will shift conversations too, because moderation might be a little bit more porous.
Wood: I know these conversations about targeting children on online gaming isn't new. I remember. I'm a middle-aged member of Gen Z. And when I was growing up, I had a lot of conversations around Minecraft to target other games using similar strategies. I think there was commonly stories and controversies of online content creators for this type of content being predators for children following and covering how this stuff kind of works. What advice would you give to parents looking to keep their children from being targeted by these predators?
D'Anastasio: I'm in my mid-30s. I grew up playing online games, massively multiplayer online role playing games, specifically where part of the game is meeting new people and coordinating gameplay with them and making these friends and forming deep connections. Personally, I know how powerful it is to have these relationships with people and meet people who are different from you on the internet. That's like one of the greatest things that online games have been able to provide us.
But a lot has changed since I was growing up, and since a lot of parents were growing up too, and the ways in which predators are actively coordinating efforts to find and groom children on online games, it's just like nothing that was happening when we were when we were children, and we and we were in that position that that kids are in now.
At the same time, Roblox implemented dozens of safety changes over the last year to prevent predators from coming in contact with children. For Example, if you're under 13, like about a third of Roblox players are right now, you can't access certain chat features anymore. ROBLOX is implementing age verification systems that will actually analyze users ages with a video selfie using AI technology. So Roblox is really, you know, investing a lot of resources into keeping people safe on the platform now, and that is something that you know, the company's taking the initiative to do.
But parents have to take initiative too, to really you know when they see their kids signing up for Roblox or any other online game for that matter, take advantage of the systems that are provided to you as a parent. You can customize the experience that your children are having on the platform, to a certain extent, familiarize yourself with you know, what exactly am I comfortable with in terms of who my kids can talk to, how often they can talk to them, What sort of games they're playing. And also be familiar with the other apps your children download, where conversations might exist outside of Roblox, with people they meet there do.