When Michael, a YouTuber from Texas better known as Schlep, was 8, he says he was groomed on Roblox, the highly successful online children’s sandbox game. A popular developer sent him sexually explicit and gory content, manipulating him to the point that he tried to take his own life, the now 22-year-old alleges.
“My mom reached out to Roblox after I made a suicide attempt” and was in the hospital, Schlep tells us. “They blew her off entirely.” (Schlep requested that his full name not be used for privacy reasons. When reached for comment on Monday, a Roblox representative did not address Schlep’s allegation directly.)
Motivated by that experience, Schlep, whose YouTube channel counts 620,000 subscribers, has made it his mission for the last two years to keep predators off Roblox. The game has over 120 million monthly active users, 40% of whom are preteens, which makes all-seeing human moderation incredibly difficult.
Since 2018, over two dozen individuals have been “accused of abducting or abusing victims they’d met or groomed using Roblox,” Bloomberg reported last year. A new lawsuit against Roblox alleges it caused the sexual exploitation of a 9-year-old Georgia boy and calls the platform a “hunting ground for child-sex predators.” It was at least the ninth such suit filed against Roblox this year.
Schlep’s videos feature predator stings that have led to the arrests of six different US men allegedly caught online messaging decoys whom they thought were minors. Mimicking the blueprint created by To Catch a Predator decades ago, Schlep works with controversial hunter groups like EDPWatch and Predator Poachers to meet and confront these men. He says he either coordinates with local police or calls the authorities once the sting is underway.
In Schlep’s most recent viral video, which has 2.7 million views, a member of his team pretended to be an underage girl to chat with a Central California man. In June, the man agreed to meet who he thought was an underage girl at a local park. Schlep and YouTuber JiDion of EDPWatch, who has 4.3 million subscribers, were there to greet him instead. Schlep called the local police, and the man was arrested.
On Friday, Schlep, known for an avatar clad in an orange shirt and a cap bearing the letter R, received a cease-and-desist notice from Roblox Corp., which claims that he had been committing “unauthorized and harmful activities,” including “engaging in simulated child endangerment conversations” and “directing users to move conversations off platform.” Roblox closed all of his accounts, some of which he’s had since he was 8, and told him he couldn’t make any more.
‘Vigilante Groups Will Face Consequences’
Also on Friday, Roblox’s chief safety officer, Matt Kaufman, published a blog post on the company’s website about its moderation policies and working with law enforcement. The fourth section addresses vigilantes, which Roblox defines as “groups or individuals violating our policies to entrap users or otherwise self-police the platform.”
“Any account, including those of vigilante groups or individuals, caught violating our policies will face consequences up to and including removal and banning, where warranted,” Kaufman writes. Schlep believes that the blog post was released as a “direct response” to his videos.
Schlep has been hailed as a hero in some quarters of the internet, with the hashtag #freeschlep trending on X for several days. “Schlep deserves a fucking medal for the shit he’s done to stop these monsters,” writes one user. “It’s sad to see how Roblox is treating him when he is the one who is making the platform a better place,” writes another. But apparently Roblox Corp., the $91 billion public company that owns and operates the platform, disagrees.
We contacted Roblox, which did not address Schlep’s allegations directly, instead referring back to Kaufman’s post. “It’s important to speak with the right sources to really understand how vigilante individuals and groups operate (e.g., violating policies around sharing PII [personally identifiable information], engaging in sexual conversations, lying about their ages, etc.), all while having a profit motive to evade detection instead of providing companies like ours with all the information to take the necessary action,” a representative says.
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Yesterday, Kaufman posted a lengthy response to the public outcry. “More recently, vigilante activity evolved,” he writes. “Instead of just reporting on safety issues, vigilantes started impersonating children and actively sought to connect with adult users. Those conversations mimicked inappropriate behavior and actively encouraged other users to connect on other social media and messaging platforms—thus bypassing Roblox’s own safety systems.”
The Roblox platform is broken up into thousands of different games that can be made by anyone, including “condos” designed for erotic roleplay. After our interview, Schlep shared a couple of servers for me to check out the problem firsthand. Within minutes of my joining, multiple users asked in public chat to “freak” or “condo” over private message. When a user wrote, “I’m a minor, pls don’t touch me,” another responded, “U gotta tell them ur old they like kids.”
Schlep says he’s tried sending information about predators he’s found to Roblox through its moderation systems, creating tickets like the company recommends, but he feels his work falls on deaf ears. The cease-and-desist letter “is the first real contact that they’ve ever given me,” he says. “If they opened the line with me, they would directly be acknowledging the predators on their platform. And them doing that is in itself an admission that their site isn’t safe.”
‘I Am Peeling Back the Curtain’
Benjamin Simon focuses on Roblox’s moderation problems on his 1.22 million-subscriber YouTube channel, Ruben Sim. “Vigilantism is where you take the law into your own hands,” Simon points out. “But that’s not what Schlep is doing. All he’s doing is reporting these people to the police. You know he’s not trying to arrest them himself.”
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(In 2021, Roblox sued Simon, alleging he created a “cybermob,” posted an image of Hitler in-game, and suggested on Twitter that a terrorist attack would occur at the October 2021 Roblox Developers Conference. The two parties settled in early 2022, with Simon agreeing to pay the company $150,000 and not to make any more Roblox accounts.)
Predator hunting content in general is a controversial subject online. The prototype of the format, To Catch a Predator, was cancelled in 2008 after NBC settled a $105 million lawsuit with the family of a sting target who died by suicide. Since then, dozens of amateur predator hunters, some of whom I’ve covered in the past, have taken their activities into the real world. According to USA Today, three-quarters of states have had online predator stings.
Schlep has been criticized on the legal front before. In March, a 20-year-old man was arrested in Virginia after Schlep and JiDion met him at a local library. (Schlep’s video of the arrest pulled in 1.9 million views.) “The manner in which EDP Watch conducted this operation, without any notice or involvement of law enforcement until after a confrontation occurred in a public place, raises serious concerns,” a commonwealth attorney told Shore Daily News.
But Schlep swears that he does everything by the book and that he and his collaborators “are totally in the confines of the law when we go ahead and catch these people.”
Schlep monetizes his YouTube videos through ad revenue and has his own website where fans can buy merchandise and pay a monthly fee to watch more unfiltered content of the arrests. He also runs Maliboomer, an entirely PG YouTube channel with 150,000 subscribers that’s dedicated to a rollercoaster game inside of Roblox.
“I have hundreds of thousands of subscribers that I’m pretty much gonna have to quit entirely because I can’t access Roblox anymore,” Schlep says. “That’s a lot of my revenue streams just totally cut off. So yeah, it’s pretty rough.”
Schlep concedes to being relatively powerless, but says he’s been heartened by the online community’s response to his banning. “They are a multi-billion dollar corporation, and they can pretty much do whatever the hell they want,” he says. “They got lawmakers on their side. I view this as kind of a David and Goliath situation. I am peeling [back] the curtain of what is really going on, and I am definitely upsetting some of the people at Roblox.”
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About Steven Asarch
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