Chris Hansen Is Investigating Roblox Predators. Here Is What Parents Need to Know.

When Chris Hansen walks into a room, people pay attention. The longtime host of To Catch a Predator spent years confronting adults who traveled to meet children they had groomed online, and his work helped reshape how Americans think about internet safety. Now he has turned his attention to Roblox, and what he found should stop every parent in their tracks.

In February 2026, Hansen released Dangerous Games: Investigating Roblox, a documentary special that premiered exclusively on TruBlu, his streaming platform. The investigation drew on interviews with law enforcement, abuse survivors, and a controversial YouTuber who had been building cases against Roblox predators for years. What the documentary reveals is not a fringe problem. It is a systemic one.

Hansen put it plainly in an April 2026 Fox News interview: the danger on Roblox today is far worse than the AOL chatrooms he investigated more than two decades ago. "There are so many different platforms upon which adults can approach children," he said. "If kids are flying off a ride at an amusement park, developers have a responsibility to make that ride safer."

What Hansen Actually Investigated

The documentary is built around two parallel threads. The first is the platform itself: how Roblox's open chat system, friend request features, and user-created game spaces have made it easy for adults to approach children. The second thread involves a 22-year-old Texas YouTuber named Michael Schlep, whose story revealed something even more troubling than the predators themselves.

Schlep had spent months running sting operations on Roblox. His team created decoy accounts posing as minors, let adult users send incriminating messages without prompting, and then coordinated with law enforcement to make arrests. Over ten months, his work contributed to six confirmed arrests. Two of those cases resulted in convictions: Amori Hunt, convicted on three counts of child pornography, and Donald Boomgarn, convicted for planning to assault and record a 14-year-old.

In August 2025, Roblox permanently banned Schlep from the platform and sent him a cease and desist letter. The company's stated rationale was that his activities violated its terms of service. It also claimed that his group moved users off-platform to conduct conversations, which Roblox said normalized inappropriate behavior.

The public response was swift and loud. Thousands of players rallied behind the hashtag #FreeSchlep. The law firm representing Schlep stated that Roblox's own policies had enabled child predators, and noted that it represented more than 500 clients with similar stories of abuse. Hansen entered the picture to investigate why Roblox had gone after the person exposing the problem rather than confronting the problem itself.

What the Investigation Found About How Predators Use Roblox

Hansen's documentary does not just tell parents that predators exist on Roblox. It explains the specific mechanics that make Roblox attractive to them, and those details are worth understanding clearly.

Open access to children at massive scale

Roblox reports more than 71 million daily active users worldwide, a large portion of whom are minors. The platform's open structure allows any user to send friend requests to any other user, join games where strangers interact freely, and chat in public or private spaces. For an adult seeking access to children, Roblox is not just a game. It is a directory.

Grooming that starts in-game and moves off-platform

A consistent pattern identified in the investigation is that predators begin contact on Roblox and then push to move the conversation to Discord, Snapchat, or other platforms where Roblox's moderation has no reach. The transition is often gradual: a few friendly messages, an offer to play together, a suggestion to "talk more" somewhere else. By the time the conversation has moved off Roblox, the platform has no visibility into what is happening.

Chat filters that are easy to evade

Hansen's team found that predators bypass Roblox's text filters using special characters, substituted letters, and coded language. A filter looking for explicit words will not catch a message that replaces letters with numbers or spaces them out. Children may not recognize what is happening even when the language seems odd to them.

Games designed to simulate adult scenarios

Among the most disturbing findings is the existence of user-created Roblox games explicitly built to simulate romantic or adult interactions using the platform's avatar system. The cartoon art style masks what is actually happening inside these spaces. Automated moderation struggles to detect behavior that unfolds through game mechanics rather than direct text messages.

Roblox currency as a lure

Investigators also documented cases where predators used offers of Robux, Roblox's virtual currency, to manipulate children. The offers create a relationship of exchange and obligation before any explicit content is introduced.

Why This Matters Beyond One Documentary

Chris Hansen has investigated online predators for over two decades. When he says Roblox is worse than what he covered in the early 2000s, that is not a publicity line. It reflects a genuine shift in how predators operate and how difficult the problem has become to address.

The scale is different. AOL chatrooms were one channel. Roblox is a platform with 71 million daily users, thousands of user-created games, voice chat, private messaging, and deep social features designed to keep children engaged for hours at a time. The platform is built to be sticky, and that stickiness works in a predator's favor as much as it does in Roblox's quarterly earnings reports.

The legal pressure building around Roblox confirms that Hansen's documentary is not the only institution paying attention. More than 140 civil lawsuits are working through US courts. Texas, Nebraska, Nevada, and Alabama have all taken legal action against the company. Louisiana authorities arrested a man for using Roblox to exploit children. The Philippines came close to banning the platform outright. Australia's eSafety Commissioner issued legally enforceable demands for transparency about Roblox's safety practices.

Roblox is not being singled out unfairly. The evidence keeps pointing in the same direction.

What Parents Often Get Wrong About the Risk

The most common mistake parents make is treating Roblox as a game rather than a social platform. The two feel different, but the risk profile is closer to a social network than to a single-player video game. Your child is interacting with strangers in real time, forming relationships, and in many cases sharing personal details without realizing it.

The cartoon visuals reinforce the sense that nothing serious can happen here. That is exactly what makes Roblox effective for grooming. An adult building a relationship with a child through a blocky avatar in a colorful virtual world does not look like what most parents imagine when they think about predators.

Hansen said it plainly: the platform's visual style masks the underlying dangers. Parents who dismiss concerns because "it's just Roblox" are making a decision based on aesthetics, not on how the platform actually works.

What You Can Do Right Now

The goal is not to panic and pull the plug. For many children, Roblox is a genuine social outlet and a source of creativity and connection. The goal is to be informed and to fill the gaps that Roblox itself has not filled.

Lock down friend requests

Go into your child's Roblox account settings and restrict who can send friend requests. The default setting allows anyone on the platform to contact your child. It should not be left on the default.

Disable or restrict chat

For younger children, disabling chat entirely removes the primary vector for grooming. For older kids, restrict chat to confirmed friends only. Make sure your child understands they should never accept friend requests from people they do not know in real life.

Talk about the off-platform move

The most important conversation you can have with your child is about what happens when someone in a game asks them to move to Discord, Snapchat, or anywhere else. That move is a red flag. Teach them to recognize it, and make clear they should tell you immediately if it happens.

Know who your child's friends are

Periodically look at your child's friend list. Not as surveillance, but as parental awareness. If there are names you do not recognize, ask about them. A 30-second conversation can reveal whether a "friend" is someone from school or a stranger your child met in a game three weeks ago.

Review Roblox's built-in parental controls

Roblox has a parental control panel that most parents have never opened. It includes spending controls, content restrictions, and communication settings. Our complete Roblox parental controls guide walks through every setting and what it actually does.

The Visibility Gap Roblox Has Not Solved

Even after all of Roblox's announced safety changes, the platform does not give parents visibility into what is actually happening on their child's account. You can restrict behavior through settings. You cannot see who your child has been talking to, which games they have visited, or whether someone new has entered their friend list overnight.

That gap is real, and it matters. Hansen's documentary makes clear that predators are patient. They build trust over weeks or months before anything alarming happens. A parent who checks in once at account setup and never looks again is operating blind through exactly the window of time when grooming is most likely to occur.

Settings reduce risk. Ongoing awareness is what catches problems before they escalate. Those two things are not the same, and Roblox currently only helps with one of them.

The Bottom Line

Chris Hansen has spent his career making the danger of online predators visible to parents who would otherwise never see it. His Roblox investigation is not alarmism. It is documented, specific, and backed by arrests, convictions, and a wave of legal action from prosecutors across the country and around the world.

Roblox is a platform where children spend hours every day, in real-time contact with strangers, in an environment designed to feel safe but missing critical safeguards. Hansen's documentary brings mainstream attention to a risk that the legal system, international regulators, and thousands of affected families already know is real.

The right response for parents is not fear. It is the same thing it has always been: stay informed, stay involved, and do not assume that something designed for kids is automatically safe.