Roblox the company’s shares fell as much as nine percent after the release of a report that said the software was a “hell place for pedophiles” and included numbers that it said suggested the company was significantly exaggerating the number of people using it.
For those who pay close attention, a tool for creating gaming platforms Roblox has it seemed like a place You power to want keep your children away for years. However, most parents routinely consider it a unthreatening online playground. The hugely successful website for wildly popular user-generated games has been repeatedly accused of doing far too little to protect its juvenile users from exploitation and sexual predators. This was highlighted in a report by short-selling research firm Hindenburg Research.
How reported by FortuneHindenburg Research has sent his latest investigation under the title “Roblox: Inflated key indicators on Wall Street and child abuse hell”
User inflation
The accusations contained therein are, as the title may suggest, extremely inflammatory. It begins with the suggestion that Roblox Corp’s stock prices are inflated as a result of “growth rates presented to Wall Street” that do not reflect reality. The company, which has lost money every quarter since going public in 2021, is accused of “lying to investors, regulators and advertisers about the number of ‘people’ on its platform, inflating a key metric by 25-42%+.” He then adds: “We also show how engagement hours, another key metric, are inflated by an estimated over 100%.”
These alleged numbers are based on a comparison of numbers publicly reported by Roblox with those provided by former employees, who say the extensions vary significantly, which includes multiple accounts and bots. The report even went so far as to describe it as “two sets of ledgers for counting users: one for internal business decisions… and the other used by the finance team to report higher metrics to investors.”
Accusations of grossly inflated player numbers go much further. Hindenburg says his research has shown this Robloxsecond most popular game, Blox Fruitsis “dominated by traffic from Vietnam,” where hugely popular Facebook groups have advertised methods of running more than 20 Roblox cards at a time, which players may be incentivized to do because they can sell the fruits of their labor for in-game currency.
Hindenburg says it hired a technical consultant who “monitored approximately 7,200 of the most popular Roblox games on approximately 2.1 million Roblox servers, collecting 297.7 million rows of player data in real time.” Based on this extensive data, the investigative low seller finds that instead of the average user playing 2.4 hours a day as Roblox data indicates, it was actually closer to around 22 minutes. The report suggests this is partly due to bots and partly thanks to this claim Roblox “encourages developers to create AFK games that artificially increase engagement.”
“Pedophilic hellscape”
Following investigations conducted by Wire and perfect People create games in 2021, Hindenburg retains its most provocative language on child protection. He uses the words: “our in-game research has revealed an X-rated pedophile hell, exposing children to grooming, pornography, violent content and extremely abusive speech.”
The report specifically referred to 2024 National Center on Sexual Exploitation report titled “Roblox He treats child protection like a game.”
In this case, the report’s evidence is more anecdotal than analytical, but it nonetheless finds some damning evidence that suggests a widespread lack of care when it comes to protecting children. Multiple accounts registered under various “Jeffrey Epstein” names had usernames such as “@igruum_minors” and “@RavpeTinyK1dsJE”. The most shocking item reported is:
Once we found our username, we entered our age as “under 13” to see if children were exposed to adult content. By simply typing the word “adult” into the Roblox search bar, we found a group called “Adult Studios,” consisting of 3,334 members who openly traffic in child pornography and solicit sexual activity from minors.
We tracked down some members of “Adult Studios” and easily found 38 Roblox groups – one with 103,000 members – openly soliciting sexual favors and trading child pornography.
Since the publication of the report, the “Adult Studios” group has been closed.
The next part of the report discusses in detail the games available in Roblox which seem to be easy to detect and block, with names like Escape to Epstein’s Island AND Escape from Diddy’s simulator. Hindenburg also found games that had one million visits A simulator of beating a homeless man outdoors on July 11 AND Beat up a pregnant womanthe latter was described as one in which “users hacked pregnant women to death in a Wal-Mart parking lot with machetes or killed them with frying pans or various firearms.”
Next,
While posing as a child in a Roblox “therapy” experience, our therapist introduced himself as a “rapper with only one p.” We were advised to run away from home and that he would come get us so we could move into his basement in exchange for paying the rent with our bodies.
A recurring theme in the report is that by registering accounts as children as young as 8 or 9, there were no restrictions on adult-themed groups and even groups that were repeatedly moderated for “trafficking underage pornography.”
Roblox’s answer
Roblox Corporation responded to Hindenburg’s report overnight. The company titled its response: “Roblox Denies Misleading Claims in Hindenburg Report” (pdf) and begins with wildly irrelevant statements such as: “Every day, tens of millions of users of all ages interact safely and positively with Roblox by adhering to the company’s Community Standards.”
This is undoubtedly true, but it does not invalidate any of Hindenburg’s claims. It’s a bit like an automaker responding to reports of one of its cars constantly exploding by saying, “It’s not every day that millions of customers explode.” It then reaffirms the company’s commitment to “proactive and preventive security measures,” which, one might argue, is nothing to brag about in the face of thousands of words of detailed evidence that these measures don’t work.
The response then goes on to say that Hindenburg’s financial claims are “misleading”. He points out that Hindenburg as a short seller has a financial motivation here, and then talks about “cash recording” and “cash flow,” which he says he leaves out of the report because “the facts just don’t support their agenda.” “
This is a very peculiar response given the seriousness of Hindenburg Research’s claims, especially in relation to the solemn failings encountered in child protection. I’m just stating it Roblox “has made significant investments in its trust and security efforts,” with no mention of there still being room for improvement or any expression of regret for the solemn errors Hindenburg claims have been discovered, which to me suggests ambivalence at best.
Roblox Corporation is a company whose studio head, Stefano Corazza, he said earlier this year that the terrible fees paid to juvenile users creating games Roblox are a “gift” to “15-year-olds from Indonesia living in the slums.”
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