Last month, Kentucky attorney general Russell Coleman announced the details of yet another lawsuit against Roblox over suspected pedophiles lurking on the hugely popular gaming platform.
While doing so, Coleman singled out the work of one self-described “predator hunter” who claims to have helped identify alleged abusers mixing with young gamers.
“Roblox is even trying to silence those who raised these security risks,” Coleman said. “The famous case of one of their developers, Schlep, immediately comes to mind.”
Schlep is in fact Michael, a 22-year-old Texan who has spent the last two years working with a group of other Roblox players to track down and identify people purportedly seeking to groom young children on the platform—predators like the one Schlep says allegedly groomed him a decade ago, which he says led him to try to take his own life.
In the process of attempting to out suspected groomers, Schlep—who doesn’t share his surname for privacy reasons—has amassed 2.3 million subscribers on his YouTube channel, where he highlights what he believes to be the shortcomings of Roblox’s safety features and reveals the identities of the alleged predators he has tracked down.
But on August 8, Schlep received a cease-and-desist letter from Roblox, and instantly, all of his accounts were banned. His predator hunter days were over.
“While Roblox acknowledges that your stated intentions may be to protect children, and while it recognizes the serious nature of online predatory behavior, your methods, including failing to immediately report suspicious activity to Roblox through proper channels, are actively interfering with Roblox’s established safety protocols and, critically, are exposing Roblox’s users to increased risk,” the company wrote in the letter reviewed by WIRED.
Roblox’s cease-and-desist against Schlep comes amid mounting pressure against the company. Over the past four months, several states have launched high-profile legal actions alleging that the gaming platform has become a hunting ground for pedophiles preying on its youngest and most vulnerable users.
In August, Louisiana’s attorney general filed a lawsuit alleging Roblox “knowingly enabled and facilitated the systemic sexual exploitation and abuse of children.” In October, Florida attorney general James Uthmeier issued criminal subpoenas to the company to assess whether it is “aiding predators in accessing and harming children.” And earlier this month, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton sued Roblox, alleging it is “putting pixel pedophiles and profits over the safety of Texas children.”
On November 18, activist groups UltraViolet and ParentsTogether Action held a virtual protest inside Roblox to deliver a petition calling on company CEO David Baszucki to “put child safety before engagement metrics.”
Roblox announced a new AI-powered age verification system in September and is now expanding it to include chat. The company did not respond to a request for comment about the growing number of lawsuits it’s facing.
Schlep claims his work reporting individuals directly to law enforcement and collaborating with vigilante groups like Pedophile Poachers and EDP Watch has led to the arrests of six men that he alleged were trying to sexually exploit young children. Once they have identified someone they believe to be a pedophile, these vigilante groups typically lure their targets into real world meetings by pretending to be an underage boy or girl. At the meeting, the groups will film their encounters with their targets, before uploading the footage to their social media channels.
“The only way this can really be viewed in my eyes is Roblox is trying to silence a critic who has exposed the insane flaw in their platform: that there are sexual predators everywhere,” Schlep says. “I think Roblox wants to make an example of me.”
Despite these pedophile hunting groups’ stated intentions of protecting children, extremism researchers and law enforcement officials have criticized their methods for being focused on gaining more followers rather than securing prosecutions. Some have also faced their own criminal charges; The New York Times reported in March that pedophile hunters were behind over 170 violent vigilante attacks since 2023.
“Taking the law into your hands isn’t safe in the real world, and it’s not safe online,” a spokesperson for Roblox said. “That’s why we work with law enforcement to hold bad actors accountable.”
But Schlep sees the decision as yet another sign of just how disconnected he believes the company is from the wider community.
In light of his ban, a massive #FreeSchlep movement has sprung up online, with supporters posting on social media as well as holding virtual protests on Roblox. Some of the biggest Roblox influencers, including Kindly Keyin and ThinkNoodles—who have 5.8 million and 12.2 million subscribers on YouTube, respectively—have publicly left the company’s partner program this fall in solidarity with Schlep.
Schlep says he began playing games on the platform when he was 7. Five years later, he says, he was groomed on Roblox by a man, and that the abuse was so bad that he says he attempted suicide.
While Schlep was recovering in a hospital, he claims his mother contacted Roblox about the situation, but he says she was “brushed off.” Roblox did not respond to multiple requests for comment about this incident.
In 2023, Schlep decided to take things into his own hands and began posting to his YouTube channel about the alleged grooming and sexual exploitation on the platform.
“It was mind-blowing,” Schlep says. “There were communities of people trading child pornography for Roblox’s in-game currency, Robux. They put up on group walls where anybody could view, ‘I will pay five Robux for cheese pizza,’ which stands for child pornography.” He says these groups were accessible to kids. The idea that cheese pizza was code for “child pornography” originates in the Pizzagate conspiracy theory from 2016. In leaked emails, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta referenced pizza, which users of fringe online message boards like 4chan falsely claimed was code for child sexual abuse material.
Much of the work of tracking down Roblox predators began on Discord, where Schlep and a team of what he says is up to six amateur investigators would seek out servers dedicated to so-called “condo games” on Roblox. While Roblox defines these sorts of games as “social hangout experiences depicting private spaces,” Schlep alleges they are often overtly sexual spaces.
So-called condo games “refers to sex communities on Roblox, and these Discord communities would be dedicated to bypassing the rules of Roblox,” Schlep says. “People would upload these graphic sex games with animations and everything. When Roblox would take it down, people on Discord would create a brand new link, and people would join the new link. It would just be like a game of whack-a-mole for Roblox.”
In mid August, around the filing of the lawsuit by the Louisiana attorney general, Roblox updated its terms of use to restrict these games to users who are ID-verified to be 17 years old or older.
Schlep began interacting with what he alleges are potential predators not on Roblox but on Discord, where a quick search, he claims, would allow him to find servers dedicated to people looking for partners with whom to play condo games. Discord did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment, but it appears it may have recently made it more difficult for users to find these condo servers, and WIRED was unable to easily locate them on the platform.
“I would just send a simple message, like, ‘Hi’ and my DMs would just be flooded,” Schlep alleges. “And a lot of them were predators.” He says these people would begin sexually explicit conversations, saying “some of the most disgusting things.”
Schlep and his colleagues would then ask the person they were communicating with where they lived. When the person asked the same question, Schlep would respond by giving a location relatively close to the predator’s home.
Schlep claims he would then work with pedophile hunter groups like Predator Poachers to conduct a sting operation where he says they lure the alleged predator into confessing on camera, something that can happen both before and after the police show up.
Of the six alleged predators arrested following stings by Schlep and his team, none have so far been convicted, Schlep says, and at least one of them has not proceeded to prosecution, while two others are heading for plea deals.
Schlep’s lawyer, Martin Gould, tells WIRED that Schlep turned to working with pedophile hunting groups because there was no other option.
“A lot of these people are doing what they’re doing because there’s a void, because no one else is addressing the problem,” Gould says.
In a blog post explaining the new rules, Matt Kaufman, Roblox’s chief safety officer, wrote that “on multiple occasions” the company had observed vigilante groups refraining from reporting issues to Roblox until after they had posted about it on social media in order to boost their own followings.
Schlep denies Roblox’s allegations that he did anything wrong.
“They’re saying that I’m impersonating children,” Schlep says. “That’s just a total lie. Impersonation means I’m taking the identity of a real kid. We’ve never used any photos of real kids, or taken the identity of a real kid. We create new identities, and everyone is above the age of 18, but we just pretend that we’re a minor.” He also says he’s the only person to have his accounts banned by Roblox; his team members have not been punished. The company did not respond to a request for comment on what it meant by “impersonating children” and whether it had banned other accounts since implementing its new rules.
The controversy around Schlep comes as law firms across the country are prepping hundreds of lawsuits on behalf of parents of young children who all allege they were groomed or exploited, and in some cases even kidnapped and sexually assaulted.
While Schlep can no longer access Roblox, he is still working to highlight the issues on the platform. His YouTube channel has grown its following significantly since the ban, and he is now collaborating with Chris Hansen, the journalist who previously hosted the To Catch a Predator segment on Dateline NBC and is currently working on an investigation into alleged predators on Roblox.
Ultimately Schlep believes the solution is simple.
“It shouldn’t be so open and accessible, that’s the main issue here,” Schlep alleges of Roblox’s platform. “The fact that you can just search up a term on Roblox and you’re able to join a sex game, that’s just ridiculous. If Disney or Lego or any other of these children’s companies were held to the same standards, they would be getting crucified in the media. It’s so insane to see how much leeway Roblox has been given, and so many children are becoming victimized in the process.”
