← Have A Seat with Chris Hansen
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So good, so good, so good.
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There is perhaps no more dangerous platform for children in this world than the massively popular Roblox multi layered gaming platform available around the world. Our investigation, conducted by myself and my streaming network True Blue, found some shocking incidents of predators exploiting children in a place that should be safe. In a place where parents assume incorrectly, sadly, that these Lego looking characters are just there for fun, that nobody would dare prey upon their children. But in one Florida county alone in our investigation, we found a man who is exploiting children all over the country. More than a dozen and a victim. A 10 year old girl, homeschooled, good family, good home, who is victimized by a predator on Roblox. All the way from the United Kingdom. Attorneys general across the country are taking action, including the Attorney General of Connecticut, William Tong, who joins me now to have a seat and talk about all of this. Sir, thank you for joining us and having a seat. I appreciate it.
- [01:44]
C
Thank you, Chris. And I'm in Stamford, Connecticut, so to you, welcome home again to Stanford.
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A
I spent a lot of time there. It's a great city, a great place and I need to get back there and visit some of my old friends. I appreciate it and I appreciate you for being so vigilant on this topic. Sir, was there one incident that made you say I got to get involved here or was it just a collective, oh my God, this is terrible.
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C
It's hard to believe I have adult children, but I have a 20 year old, a 17 year old and a 15 year old. But it has really come into focus for me as a parent and obviously the addiction that we all have, particularly our children to these things, our phones and our devices and the platforms. But watching my son play Roblox and how immersive it is, how engaging it is, how addictive it is. He's, he's 15 now and it's, he's a good kid. You know, he's an athlete, he's a strong student. But like many, many kids, even if you try to do everything right, they're still stuck on these platforms and they're, and they're addicted and, and, and these platforms do everything they can to hold on to our children and, and their eyeballs and their attention. Of course, for me it's talking with victims and parents. I met Tammy Rodriguez in my office not long ago. She lost her 11 year old daughter Selena, who took her own life as a result of social media addiction. And so these people aren't just victims and survivors and constituents, but, but they leave a mark on you when you talk to them.
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A
One of the characters in our documentary, our investigation is a guy named Schlepp. He goes by Schlep Online. And he was first victimized by a predator, somebody he thought was a mentor online took a toll on his life. Now he's become an advocate. And I think this speaks to the attitude of Roblox because they had an opportunity here to make him a part of the team, a part of the solution. And yet what we've seen is when he has exposed predators on the platform, they attack him, they ban him. And during a recent presentation I did at CrimeCon with him and your counterpart from Louisiana, Liz Merle, he actually showed me how to get on Roblox and exist there. And within minutes we were hit upon by somebody who was likely a predator and suddenly they banned the account. So they're watching us, surveilling us, showing how this can happen, yet they won't bring this young man on board to say here's how we can fix the problem. What does that say about Roblox?
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C
Yeah, I think what it says is they've failed to be responsive. We have our own complaints here in Connecticut where a mom called us and said, I'm really concerned about my child's use. I think the child was as young as six years old and she's reached out to Roblox. I think the kid was put in the wrong age group, for example, because they have this, this new system where they're trying to group users, children as young as 5 by age group and they're in the wrong age group and therefore being exposed to the wrong content, the wrong settings and they're not getting back to them. And we've heard other examples of parents reaching out, saying I'm really concerned about the suicidal ideation of my children and getting responses like an email. Look, here's a link to a suicide hotline. I mean that's all they're getting from Roblox. No real response, no real interaction. And that's a big source of our investigation.
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Roblox has a parental advisory group and it makes it look like, oh, we want to hear from you, we want to know how to make this safer and better. We want your input. But in order to be on that parental advisory and somebody sneaked me the agreement, you have to a sign an NDA and an agreement that you'll never seek any legal action against any employee of Roblox or the corporate entity itself. What does that say to you?
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C
Yeah, it says they're not serious. And frankly, it's not just Roblox, it's the other social media platforms. As you may know, I and a large coalition of attorneys general have sued Meta, Instagram, Facebook. We're looking at all of the platforms we're investigating. TikTok, obviously, YouTube, Snap, Discord are all part of the conversation. And you know what I get over and over again from these platforms is Mr. Attorney General, we're doing everything we can. We, we have advisory groups. You know, we're using the technology, machine learning. We're programmatically trying to protect children by using our computers in our algorithms to identify harmful content. We've got thousands of people looking at the screens doing what they call content moderation. Although in recent years, even, even content moderation is under attack because people like Mark Zuckerberg are, are no longer focusing on content moderation because I think they perceive there's pressure from the federal government and the president not to limit access to certain types of content and speech on their platforms. And so they've taken off the guard rails and, and cut these platforms loose. And so I don't think they're serious about engaging with us, with parents in trying to protect children from harmful content and from predators. Now, I will say, since I've launched the investigation, Roblox has been responsive. So we'll see. It's early right now. They've been responsive to me, but of course they're responsive to me. I'm law enforcement. I don't know that they're responsive at all to everyday users.
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A
One of your counterparts, the Attorney General of Florida, whom we interviewed for our documentary, as well as this program, had indicated to me that there was potential criminal liability and has launched criminal subpoenas indicating at least the possibility that some material was requested and there was some shenanigans there that may border criminal activity. Now, if that's the case, this isn't just stalling or saying that, you know, we're going to do this on our own. These are privacy issues. We want Roblox to be free in a creative community where people can engage. This becomes criminal at some point, doesn't it?
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C
Yeah. I mean, look, anytime you're talking about child sex abuse material. Anytime you're talking about a, a predator going after a kid and getting them to send sexually explicit images to engage in conversation or conduct that is illegal, number one and of a sexually explicit nature. And then of course getting them to platform jump to another platform or as you know, Chris, then using all of these interactions to facilitate and engage in an in person meeting in which a predator engages in sexual assault, rape or otherwise. I mean, all of this is criminal activity. So it should come as no surprise to anybody that there's criminal exposure for people if they facilitate or aid and abet that, that sort of conduct. Now in Connecticut, I don't really have criminal jurisdiction that is, that is exercised by the state's attorneys and other states they're called district attorneys or DAs. And so in Connecticut I don't have that. Those sets of tools and every AG is different. But certainly if, if you're facilitating this sort of conduct, you ought to be focused on and concerned about your criminal exposure.
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And one of the issues with these moderation systems is that some of the people who are doing the moderating are low paid people in other countries who may not even have, you know, a grasp of the English language to moderate. So at some point what does it mean? And my overall question, the question I'd like to ask Roblox the most and they've refused. After several zoom calls and conference calls with their security people, they've refused to go on camera and talk about this. But my question to Roblox is, and I want you to weigh in on this. If you're so concerned about security, why won't you let law enforcement go on your platform and periodically conduct a sting or an investigation and send the message out to predators to say we're here, we're gonna get you. So don't do this on this platform
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C
because there's too much money to be made. I mean the growth in Roblox is beyond explosive. Chris. Half of American children use this platform. When you started your work focused on catching predators and helping law enforcement, these tools didn't exist. They didn't exist a decade ago. And they're now not just supercharged but the power of these platforms to bring children on and then expose them to these risks is unprecedented, never before seen. And what I'm really worried about now of course is you take Roblox and the exposure to this predators playground that, that is Roblox and then you add chatbots and AI. I mean this thing is going to be super, super powerful in its ability to harm young people and children as we move forward.
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This is a multi billion dollar publicly traded company. Limit engagement, you limit profits. Is it that simple?
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C
Yeah. Mean they make money off eyeballs, they make money off engagement. And anything that you and I do to, to, to protect people, to minimize use engagement eyeballs on the platform is bad for business. And, and that's why they're willing to put up with a whole litany of, of misconduct and harms. Because at the end of the day that's the cost of doing their business. And so you know everything from Selena and her suicide in Connecticut to the people that Schlep sees, to the California man who was recently arrested for grooming a 13 year old girl in Connecticut. And then I'm sure you're aware of these, these extreme nihilistic groups.
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I was going to ask you about that next.764 is one of the most evil entities I have investigated in 44 years in journalism. I mean these people wake up every morning and I've had fathers of children on this very program who've committed suicide, pour their hearts out and who have done everything. These aren't bad parents, these aren't negligent parents, these are loving parents. And these people wake up every Morning. These seven, six, four people. And they decide, how can we f. With people today? How can we take somebody's life? And they tell these children, if you want to get control over your life and get away from your parents, the best way to do it is attempt suicide. And the best way to attempt suicide is to do it in a live stream. I mean, who does that? And. And these people know that they have potentially receptive victims on this platform, on robots.
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C
The question is not just who, but. But why and why today? And I think, look, you and I can both agree
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that.
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C
That there have always been. There have always been predators. There have always been child molesters. There have always been child rapists. There have always been people who've committed these crimes against children for a very long time. This is happening now in part because these tools are so robust and enable these predators to go after children, number one. But number two, these guys, mostly guys, I think, are on the platforms themselves talking to others who. Who share their pathology. Right. Who share their interest in undermining and destroying society, who get into these chat rooms themselves and their ability to engage with others and then turbocharge their hatred, their sickness, their mental illness is. Is now more. More aggressive and more powerful than it's ever been. And so now we have these guys who, yeah, may. Without computers and without social media, maybe they would have had some of these inclinations. And. And this. I can only. I can only describe it as sickness or mental illness or pathology.
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But.
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C
But now they get together, the whole bunch of people like them.
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Yeah, and their evil is homemade sin. I mean, there's no question. One of the issues here, and it's both a defense raised by Roblox and a reality of this sort of evil grooming, is that sometimes the initial contact is made on Roblox, and then the predator or the nihilist seeking to do evil things brings the conversation over to Discord, for instance, which is vastly unregulated. And if you think Roblox is problematic, Discord is the wild, wild West. And I don't know, do you go after Discord as well? Is that part of this? Do you have to hold them accountable?
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C
Some of my colleagues, it seems like
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they're getting a little bit of a pass here, you know?
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C
Yeah, I think they're getting a pass. We're looking at all of them. And some of my colleagues have sued both Roblox and Discord. Some of my colleagues have already engaged in settlements with Roblox. Many of us, including Connecticut, are in close communication with our multi State partners. I was just with, physically at a meeting with my fellow attorneys general, Democrats and Republicans. All of this came up. And so I have nothing to announce today, but we were working on all of these platforms and of course, the future with AI and artificial intelligence. And I think you and I know, Chris, we're having this conversation in June of 2026. This conversation is going to be very different in 24 months, 36 months, absolutely.
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No, it's going to change. I mean, we're changing our methods with law enforcement around the country, how we investigate predators. I mean, you know, as they step up their technology, we try to step up ours. I mean, it's a whole different world from 22 years ago when we did the first predator investigation in Bethpage, Long island, or even when we were in, in Fairfield, Connecticut, IN, IN 2015. The. The world has changed in the last
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C
11 years, and it changes every seven minutes.
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Every seven change. Exactly right. So we've seen some attorneys general settle with Roblox. Probably you know this as well as I do, a half a dozen, maybe for 10 to 12 million dollars. And some language that changes it. Some of the attorneys general I've spoken with say that's chump change and it's just a way for the company to get these flies off their back. What are you seeking here and what would be meaningful in your mind?
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C
What would be meaningful in my mind is to protect children from these predators, period. Full stop.
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But how do you, how do you get Roblox?
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I won't rest until Roblox does what it has to do to keep our children safe. And if that means they have to invest untold gazillion dollars in making that happen, that's not my problem. That's their problem. That means they have to pay the states a gazillion dollars to help us protect children. Because they won't do it, then they're going to have to do that. And if it means that roadblocks will have to change as a company or that it needs to get broken up, well, we'll have that conversation, too.
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My impression from talking to Roblox, and we'll talk in a second here after I ask you this question about what they have done. But my impression of Roblox is there's a. There's a certain amount of arrogance. The attitude, to me at least, seems to be we created this world and we know what's best for it. And to hell with you, Chris Hansen. To hell with you, Attorney General Tong. We know what's best.
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Yeah, I mean, they can.
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I mean, is, am I wrong here? Am I, Am I?
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Yeah. I mean, they, they, they can say that all they want, but we are going to keep coming. And you know, you can ask Live Nation, Ticketmaster what they get from telling the ags to go pound sand and to hell with, to hell with ags, or ask Purdue Pharma and the Sacklers that are now out of business because Connecticut led the way. So we're going to keep coming and at the end of the day, I'm not going to stop until kids are protected. And I'll give you a good example. There's an experience on Roblox where you can be Adam Lanza, you can be the shooter at Sandy Hook Elementary.
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I was just going to ask about this.
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C
I have seen the screenshots in. You know, as a former Stanford resident, Chris, I don't have to tell you, for those of us who live in this community, who live down the street from Newtown, it is a particular kind of unspeakable horror that somebody would want to put that experience on a platform for children. And so you asked me, what do I want? I want it to stop Waking up
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A
I covered Sandy Hook. I was sitting in my office here in New York City on a Friday afternoon, you know, hoping for an easy day, actually. I was going to go to some people for dinner and there was a report of a shooting in a school Sandy Hook. And I called a friend of mine who was in the FBI in Connecticut and I said, hey, I need to know what's going on here because I need to figure out whether or not we need to move troops out there. He said, stand by, I'll call you back. Ten minutes goes by, he calls back, he said, are you sitting down? I said, yeah, why? He said, 20 kids, six adults. I said, dead? He said, dead. I walked downstairs. I was at NBC at the time. I said, everybody we have needs to go now. Well, we'll get cars. No, get on a train. It's the quickest way. And we, we spent all night and, you know, much of the news world was out there for, for weeks on end. And to think after talking to people who lost their child and, you know, I try to be very sensitive in each and every one of these interviews in my entire career, including the interviews with parents who've lost kids or have had kids preyed upon on Roblox, to be very sensitive. But it's heartbreaking. It takes its toll. I mean, these parents are never the same. And to have a game that mimics the Sandy Hook shooting and allows a child to be Adam Lanza, to me, that is absolutely unforgivable, unconscionable. I mean, how does that even slip by a censor to have that game there?
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C
But what does that tell you? It tells me whatever they're doing, they're
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doing what doesn't work to get engagement,
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C
doesn't work, whatever, right? So let's put it the best possible light. We're trying, Mr. Attorney General, we're trying to protect children. Well, it's not working, not even close. And so whatever you're doing with age, gating, for example, which for a long time was a joke, right? They would just basically ask you, are you 18? All right, good. You can come in. And now they're saying they're putting kids in groups by age, which isn't working that well apparently based on the complaints that I receive. And the default settings for certain age groups are you can't have direct chats or direct messages. But all of that's getting circumvented all that's getting circumvented by adults who pose as children, by the ability of kids, even if you can't direct message to be in small group chats or to go in the experiences and have chats in the experiences. And at any time along the way, a predator can say, hey, love talking to you. Let's go to discord.
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Yeah, well, that's what happens. I mean, we had a case down in Martin County, Florida, and two sisters got chatting with a fellow and an adult, they were underage, an adult in Iowa, and he decides to get in his car, come down there and pick him up. And thankfully the sheriff's investigators were all over it. The parents reported it and they were able to intercept them someplace in Georgia. But he was on his way to take these girls as his sex slaves in a different state. And what happens if you're not in one of, you know, a jurisdiction that's got sharp investigators? These girls are done. We've had the cases, girls meeting adults taken to a different state, preyed upon in horrible ways. And you know, the people who've committed suicide because of the 7, 6, 4 thing, it's terrible. Roblox has said, and you alluded to this, that it has, you know, age verification and facial recognition. I have seen no slowdown in reports of predatory activity. Have you?
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No. And in fact, what I've seen is explosive growth. And the explosive growth is among adults on a children's game platform. What's that tell you?
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Well, what does it also say that they have dating opportunities for children, they have vacuum games. Schlep finds these things on a weekly basis.
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C
Yeah, it's still a wide open predators playground. And that's why knee deep in our investigation, that's why a number of states, I would say almost all of the states are in some way or another engaged in this. I'm part of a large group of states who are focused on Roblox and all of the platforms. And because Congress is unable to discharge its basic responsibilities. That's not, that's not a secret. We have to act as states.
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A
Well, it seems to me when you talk about Congress that, that every year a senate committee or congressional committee hauls all the usual suspects in from all the platforms.
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C
Yeah.
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Scolds them, scolds them. They promise to do better. And then in the ensuing six months, lobbyists get to work and water down whatever new legislation is being worked on to the point where it's acceptable to the multibillion dollar company.
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C
Yes.
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Now, I'm all about capitalism, I'm all about making money, I'm all about technology. All good. But you gotta protect children. And that's number one.
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C
Yeah. The problem is the Gold Rush steamrolls all of that. Right. And relatedly, we're focused on chatbots and people that are taking their own lives after talking to a chatbot that encourages them to take their own lives. And you know, the AI companies are responsible for developing technology that puts people at risk. But what we're hearing is, William, pump those brakes. Because there's so much growth potential. Jobs, quantum computing. Actually, nobody's saying jobs anymore because they know that a lot of people are going to lose their jobs with AI. But growth, right, economic growth, you can't slow the Gold rush. And the answer to that is at what cost? At what cost? We're not talking about socialism. We're not talking about some sort of hyper progressive liberal social economic theory. We're talking about harms to people, children, people taking their own lives, cutting themselves, hurting themselves.
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A
What would satisfy you from Roblox that would make you say, okay, they're trying to do something here. What two things or three things would you want to see from Roblox right away that would show you good faith?
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C
Well, let me be fair and say what I'm getting so far is responsiveness. I get my calls returned and I'm getting information that I'm requesting. And so I will credit at least Roblox and its lawyers right now with showing good faith and being responsive to me and to other states. But this is just the start. Meaning we're not really getting to the heart of it yet. They're being responsive. They're, they're trying to answer my questions. But at the end of the day, I am not going to be satisfied until it stops. I'm not going to be satisfied until children are protected. And Certainly for Connecticut, 5 million, 10 million, $20 million isn't going to cut it.
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A
William Tong, Attorney General for the state of Connecticut, thank you very much for having a seat with me. I appreciate it. Let's keep in touch on this.
- [32:48]
C
Thank you, Chris. Appreciate it.
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Appreciate you, sir. Thank you. One of a growing chorus of attorneys general demanding justice from Roblox. As I mentioned in my interview with Mr. Tong. We are preparing a follow up on our investigation, Dangerous Games. In fact, I'm heading out next week to do some more interviews. I mean, shocking stories. So watch for that. I'll keep you posted right here. I'll see you next Wednesday. And have a seat. Monday is When Predators I've Caught drops right here on the same platforms.
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C
Thursday.
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A
Every single Thursday, a new episode of our Predator investigative series, Takedown with Chris Hansen drops on my streaming network, True Blue. Make sure you check it out. Until then, I'll be watching and listening.
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