This is the last thing kids should be doing.
Playing the Numbers
Illegal online casinos are allowing children to gamble using their Roblox accounts — and now, families are suing the video game's parent company over it.
As the UK's Sky News reports, illegal gambling outfits like BoxFlip and RBLXWild are not hosted on Roblox itself. Rather, these third-party online casinos allow people to log in with their Roblox credentials and play games like blackjack and slots using Robux, the massive social gaming site's in-world currency.
Winnings are then exchanged for cryptocurrency, which can be converted to real cash for a fee. As with all forms of gambling, however, the issue is less about the money people — or in this case children — than the money they lose.
One of the teens impacted by these casinos, an American 16-year-old who Sky spoke to, said he spent the equivalent of about $190,000.
The teen said he was just 14 years old when he began using these online casinos, and at the time, he "didn't even know what gambling was." Initially, he thought it was a fun way to make extra cash, but eventually, he began to enjoy "the adrenaline of doing bigger and bigger bets."
While that's essentially the same ethos that goes into gambling addiction in adults, it's far more egregious when it happens to children who are still learning how the world works.
Shifty Incentives
This isn't the first time Roblox has been accused of showing its largely minor user base wildly inappropriate content.
But it may be the incident that finally pushes the court system to finally hold it accountable. As a group of families alleged in a 2023 lawsuit that only recently began proceeding through the courts, Roblox failed to protect its underage users and profited off them in the process.
In September, a US district judge ruled that the suit should be allowed to proceed because Roblox seemed to have made "deliberate design decisions" that would knowingly put children in harm's way.
Because Robox incentivizes developers to create games that users must pay to play, "it seems entirely foreseeable that developers would want to create highly addictive experiences... that entice users to spend a lot of Robux," District Judge Vince Chhabria said in his ruling.
Though Roblox demonstrated in court that it requested that RBLXWild and BoxFlip be taken down from their hosting providers back in 2022, it wasn't until after Chhabria's ruling earlier this fall that it initiated legal proceedings against them.
Roblox has denied all wrongdoing, and told Sky it "employs multiple methods to detect and disrupt bot accounts." One of BoxFlip's owners, meanwhile, said in a user chatroom that "many companies get sued" and it's all "part of doing business."
With children already navigating so many other dangers online, being enticed by illegal gambling sites that only require a Roblox login is the last thing they need.
More on internet dangers: A Google-Backed AI Startup Is Hosting Chatbots Modeled After Real-Life School Shooters — and Their Victims
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