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FIRST ON FOX: Louisiana’s attorney general brought a lawsuit Thursday against Roblox, alleging the widely-used online gaming platform is rife with child predators and harmful content.
State Attorney General Liz Murrill said Roblox, an interactive online gaming program for children that touts more than 80 million users, cared more about driving profits than installing safeguards that would help protect young gamers.
“Due to Roblox’s lack of safety protocols, it endangers the safety of the children of Louisiana,” Murrill said in a statement provided to Fox News Digital. “Roblox is overrun with harmful content and child predators because it prioritizes user growth, revenue, and profits over child safety.
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The petition, filed in the Livingston Parish district court, cited an instance of local law enforcement in the town of Livingston executing a search warrant last month on the home of a man suspected of possessing child sex abuse material.
At the time of the arrest, the petition stated, the man was actively using Roblox and also possessed voice-altering technology to make himself sound like a young woman.
The company, worth $90 billion, has faced numerous other lawsuits from individuals, including a recent one brought by a Georgia mother who alleged her nine-year-old son was sexually exploited through his use of Roblox. The mother alleged that a user “extorted” her son into sending explicit images of himself to peers.
READ A COPY OF THE LAWSUIT. APP USERS: CLICK HERE
Louisiana’s attorney general has zeroed in on Roblox’s sign-up process, alleging the company does not verify a user’s age and therefore makes it easy for child predators to pose as children and interact with them.
“The end result is that Defendant, through its failure to implement adequate safety features and its failure to provide notice of the danger, provides the perfect place for pedophiles,” state attorneys wrote in the petition.
Roblox did not respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
Murrill also alleged that the platform includes “experiences” that are sometimes not age appropriate but yet are not labeled as such.
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Louisiana attorneys claimed that Roblox fails to provide age designations on experiences “in order to increase the number of uses per experience for the purpose of increasing revenue,” in violation of consumer protection laws.
The attorneys said the platform offers minors the ability to play in “condo games” in which their avatars can enter homes and remove their virtual clothing and engage in simulated sex acts with other users’ avatars.
According to a study cited in the petition, at one point the platform hosted more than 600 “Diddy” games centered on the famous rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs’ criminal charges and featured hundreds of references to the late financier Jeffrey Epstein, who was a registered sex offender alleged to have sex trafficked underage women.
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Murrill unveiled the lawsuit in a press conference and credited the state’s Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force with investigating the company. More than 40% of Roblox’s users are under the age of 12, she said, adding that the lawsuit was part of a broader effort to address an uptick in sex crimes against minors.
“The number of tips that come in now compared to the number of tips that we used to get about 10 years ago, it’s stunning,” Murrill said. “The numbers have gone up exponentially. … It’s become so much harder because of social media sites that not only invite our children in but they facilitate their exploitation.”
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