Roblox has permabanned and threatened to sue YouTuber Schlep for conducting child predator hunts on its platform.
Civilians trying to catch criminals is far from a new phenomenon, but it’s become increasingly popular on YouTube and other video platforms over the past few years. Creators have made careers out of documenting themselves doing things like scambaiting, reverse-hacking hackers, tracking extortionist call centers, and–last but perhaps most popular–hunting down people who try to engage in explicit talks with children online.
Child predator hunting gained popularity in the early 2000s thanks to Chris Hansen and his Dateline NBC show To Catch a Predator. Now, fueled by the renewed COVID-era interest in true crime and the growing sense that law enforcement isn’t doing enough to protect the most vulnerable members of society, creators have been using Hansen-esque techniques to catch predators where kids gather–including on Roblox.
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Schlep, a 22-year-old YouTuber with nearly a million subscribers across two channels, has been playing Roblox since he was in elementary school. But not everyone he met there had good intentions.
“When I was a kid, I was groomed on Roblox by a popular developer,” he explained in a recent YouTube upload. This developer “manipulated me, used power dynamics over me, and frequently exposed me to gore and NSFW material and loads of other stuff a kid should never see.”
Things, he said, got bad enough that he made an attempt on his life. While he was recovering in the hospital, his mother reached out to Roblox about the developer’s behavior, but “They brushed her off,” Schlep said. “That predator went on to groom more victims before Roblox finally banned him–years later, by the way.”
Despite this bad experience, Schlep continued using Roblox, and during the pandemic started his first YouTube channel, Maliboomer, where he plays the Roblox game Theme Park Tycoon 2.
“As I ran Maliboomer, I kept spotting these predators, even in an innocent sandbox theme park game,” he said. “Then I started Schlep, and the emails from victims got worse every single day. And that’s when I started catching predators on Roblox.”
Over the past couple years, Schlep has worked with fellow predator-hunting creators like JiDion to find adults trying to talk to children on Roblox. Schlep and co. do this by making fresh accounts and going into various Roblox games pretending to be kids. They say they never initiate discussions, especially not sexual discussions; if a potential predators pushes the conversation in that direction, Schlep collects the evidence and sends it to Roblox and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
He says his efforts have results in six arrests, at least some of them on felony charges.
But while law enforcement has acted swiftly in response to evidence, Roblox hasn’t done the same, both Schlep and JiDion allege.
“We go to roblox.com/support, submit a moderation ticket, and then fill out the prompt with all the information regarding our arrest, and give you guys the same Google Drive that we give to the cops,” Schlep said. “And in a lot of instances, Roblox won’t even ban after we reach out to them regarding felony arrests.”
He went on to say that after he reports information to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, that organization will “go on the news to show gameplay of our decoys with the predators on Roblox,” and then the platform might take action.
“I literally felt so lost in trying to get the attention of Roblox regarding these predators, I’ve created binders with all the chat logs and I’ve sent it to their headquarters in San Mateo,” he said.
“Every time we get the arrest on the dude, he reports them right away,” JiDion added in his own upload. “Roblox doesn’t do anything. Whenever the dudes bail out and stuff, he’ll literally see them go back online, doing whatever they do, playing games and stuff, and he’s already reported them. And he’ll tweet at [Roblox] and the only time they ban the person is when the [YouTube] video drops. So we’re doing it in the process that you guys want, reporting it, but you guys don’t ban them until the video drops and you feel the public backlash.”
And now, Roblox has permanently banned Schlep, accusing him of conducting “unauthorized and harmful activities on the Roblox platform” that “directly undermine Roblox’s safety efforts and, critically, are exposing our users to increased risk.”
In a cease and desist letter to Schlep, Roblox said those “unauthorized and harmful activities” include “engaging in simulated child endangerment conversations,” “sharing or soliciting personally identifiable information,” and “directing users to move conversations off platform.” (Once Schlep and co. had a potential predator on the hook, they would move conversations to Discord so it wasn’t as easy for the person to simply sign off and disappear.)
Roblox said if Schlep makes a new account–whether for personal use or predator-hunting–it will pursue legal action.
Full legal cease and desist notice from Roblox to me. pic.twitter.com/E6KmKdDEkH
— Schlep (@RealSchlep) August 9, 2025
Tubefilter reached out to Roblox for comment, and got this statement from a spokesperson:
“At Roblox, we want all of our users to have a safe and positive experience and have robust Community Standards in place to prohibit content or behavior that may be inappropriate or harmful. While we maintain comprehensive on-platform abuse reporting tools, and actively encourage our users to use them to alert us to potentially harmful activity, we believe that safety enforcement should be left to trained professionals and proper authorities, not individual users, and we work closely with and actively seek law enforcement’s input on safety matters. In addition to dedicated internal teams that investigate safety threats and escalate serious issues, Roblox also has a trusted flagger program, where close and trusted partners can report suspected serious criminal activity to us, such as terrorism, violent extremism and possible child exploitation. Any reports we receive are promptly reviewed and, as appropriate, actioned within a short timeframe.”
Roblox also sent us a collection of 10 different quotes from researchers and members of law enforcement discouraging what it calls “vigilante groups.”
One of these quotes is from Christopher L. de Barrena-Sarobe, District Attorney in Chester County, Pennsylvania, who says, “Attacking someone so you can make money on social media is a crime…Life is not a comic book–people don’t get to be Batman. Police officers are entrusted with investigating and enforcing the law because they have the tools to get the facts right and stand these cases up in a court of law.”
This news comes shortly after a family in California filed suit against Roblox and Discord, alleging their 10-year-old daughter was “groomed and manipulated,” then kidnapped, by a 27-year-old man who met her on Roblox and used Discord to chat with her until she shared her home address.
