Senators Josh Hawley and Dick Durbin opened a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee investigation into Roblox on August 12, sending a letter to founder and CEO David Baszucki that gave the company until August 31 to preserve records and turn over documents tied to child safety on the platform. Their letter cited a specific figure: Roblox reported 65,381 instances of suspected child sexual exploitation to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children in 2025, more than double what it reported the year before.
That number lands after roughly a year in which state attorneys general, private families, and child advocacy groups built one of the largest legal campaigns ever aimed at a single gaming platform.
The lawsuits started in Louisiana
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill filed the first major state suit in August 2025, describing Roblox in her announcement as “a hub for pedophiles.” Her complaint cited specific user-created game titles allegedly hosted on the platform and referenced a Livingston Parish arrest in which police say a suspect used voice-altering software to sound like a young girl while communicating with children on Roblox.
Kentucky followed two months later. Attorney General Russell Coleman’s October 2025 suit accused the platform of functioning as “a hunting ground for child predators.” Texas filed the third state suit in November, with Attorney General Ken Paxton describing the company’s failures as protecting children from “sick and twisted freaks hiding behind a screen.” Florida, Iowa, Nebraska, Tennessee, Arkansas, Indiana, and Oklahoma each filed their own suits over the following months. Georgia, South Carolina, and Connecticut opened investigations without filing suit. More than 130 private lawsuits, mostly from families alleging their children were groomed or abused after contact made on the platform, were consolidated into multidistrict litigation in federal court.
One procedural fight ran alongside the substantive claims. Roblox’s terms of service include an arbitration clause the company tried to use to keep abuse lawsuits out of public court. A California judge rejected that approach, ruling a high-profile case against the platform had to proceed in public.
Three states settled, more kept filing
Rather than litigate every claim, Roblox began settling. Nevada reached a $12.5 million deal in April 2026, followed the same week by Alabama at $12.2 million and West Virginia at $11 million, a combined $35.8 million (plus a possible $5 million penalty if Alabama’s terms are violated within four years). Each settlement funded a mix of school resource officers, safety liaisons, and public awareness campaigns, and each required Roblox to expand age verification, restrict chat between minors and adults, and stop encrypting messages sent by users under 16.
West Virginia Attorney General JB McCuskey described the leverage that produced his state’s deal directly, telling Roblox it could work with his office or “this will end up in litigation.” Nevada, Alabama, and West Virginia chose settlement. Louisiana, Kentucky, Texas, Florida, Iowa, Nebraska, Tennessee, and Arkansas did not, and their suits remain active.
The FTC complaint added new specifics
In May 2026, the advocacy groups Fairplay and the National Center on Sexual Exploitation filed a complaint asking the FTC to investigate Roblox under Section 5 of the FTC Act, which bars unfair or deceptive business practices. Their filing included test results: researchers using an account registered as a five-year-old gained access to dating and romance-themed experiences with no verification, and separate under-13 test accounts encountered sexual language and racial slurs within minutes of joining public servers. The complaint also cited a 10-year-old who spent more than $7,000 on the platform in two months.
The filing carried one family’s account by name. Heather Lindquist’s 15-year-old son Bodhi died in December after what the complaint describes as grooming by predators he met on Roblox. “The parental controls on Roblox did not protect my son,” Lindquist said. Fairplay communications director Ashwin Verghese summarized the imbalance parents face this way: “it’s not a fair fight.”
Where the Senate investigation fits
Hawley and Durbin’s letter arrives as the newest entry in that timeline, not a standalone event. Their August 12 letter to Baszucki directed Roblox to preserve records tied to child safety, abuse, bullying, and financial exploitation, and to answer a set of questions by August 31. “Congress will not look the other way,” the senators wrote.
Roblox’s chief safety officer, Matt Kaufman, responded with the same defense the company has offered throughout the year: mandatory facial age estimation for chat access, parental controls, and moderation systems. “Roblox is built on the foundation of safety,” Kaufman said in a statement.
Roblox has more than 30 million daily users under age 13, by the company’s own count, and advocacy groups estimate more than half of all users are under 17. That scale is the throughline connecting a year of state lawsuits, three settlements, an FTC complaint, and now a Senate subcommittee with subpoena power. Each new filing has made a version of the same argument: a platform built for children needs to prove its safety claims, not just state them.
Does a year of settlements and mounting federal scrutiny suggest Roblox is finally being forced to fix a real problem, or does the size of the userbase mean no policy change will ever fully catch up to the risk?
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