Roblox’s Predator Problem

The internet’s biggest recreation zone for kids is fighting to keep pedophiles away, and it's not always winning.  By Olivia Carville and Cecilia D’Anastasio

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Roeblocks's predator problem. The Internet's biggest recreation zone for kids
is fighting to keep pedophiles away, and it's not always winning.
By Olivia carvill and Cecilia Donastasio. Doctor Rofatnik, known to
fans as Doc, looked almost Mayoral in a tall white hat,

(00:23):
a red tie, and an American flag pin. A smirk
was permanently plastered on his face as he roamed his
domain on roeblocks, the multi billion dollar gaming platform geared
toward children. His name referred to the villain of Sega's Sonic,
The Hedgehog, but to thousands of players during the first
summer of COVID nineteen, he was a hero. Doc was

(00:44):
the architect of the game's sonic Eclipse Online. Anyone can
make a game inside Roeblocks's digital sandbox, and his bootleg
version of Sega's hit franchise was a runaway success. It
offered gamers a place where they could sprint across virtual
halfpipes as the eponymous Blue Hedgehog alongside their friends for free.
By September twenty twenty, some thirty six million people, more

(01:07):
than half of them under thirteen, were on roeblocks daily,
making it the world's biggest recreation zone for kids, Sonica
Eclipse was a bustling cul de sac where children could
buy virtual roebucks currency with their weekly allowance, then use
it to get costumes and morph into cooler characters. Doc
claimed to be one of the highest paid developers on roeblocks,

(01:28):
boasting about it to his community on the chat app Discord. There,
thousands of fans who'd filtered over from Sonica Eclipse got
to know him as Jaden Shedletski twenty eight, a game developer,
industry visionary, and a bit braggadocious. As he wrote in
his bio, he was the California based younger brother of
Roeblock's legend John Shadletski, the platform's longtime creative director, or

(01:51):
so he said. No one knew what Doc really looked like,
but he told anyone who asked that he was buff,
with blonde hair and teal blue eyes. He said he
drove around in flashy cars with a hot Spanish girlfriend.
Doc's dark, edgy humor only made him more compelling to
many kids. When he posted a joke about rape, one

(02:11):
fan replied ten out of ten. When he called young
girls who'd helped him develop Sonic Eclipse sex slaves. It
became a running gag. He quipped about being the old
man with kids in his basement. Fans sparred with one
another to get on his good side and on his payroll.
Some were also quick to defend his honor in September

(02:33):
twenty twenty, when a Sonic Eclipse player posted screenshots on
Twitter of a private chat Doc had had with a
pre teen You're twelve. I expect you to be a
little slow on the upbringing, but soon I'll corrupt you
beyond your wildest dreams. Words cannot explain what I want
to do with you. You're the reason why I'm going
to end up behind bars with a laughing emoji. The

(02:56):
person who posted the screenshots was one of a group
of gamers who'd grown tired of the homophobic, racist, and
predatory tirades Doc shared on discord and had started digging
into the person behind them. When Roadblocks learned of the messages,
it shut down Doc's account, but by then he'd transferred
ownership of Sonic Eclipse to another gamer, a friend, who

(03:18):
kept it running in his stead. Doc claimed the controversy
tripled his earnings. The bragging and the efforts to expose
him continued until the spring of twenty twenty two. That's
when Doc disappeared from the internet. Gamers speculated that he'd
killed himself. Then a few months later, a player sent
an alert on discord Doc finally got arrested. Posted below

(03:41):
was an article from a New Jersey New site with
the headline. Posted below was an article from a New
Jersey New site with the headline FBI groomed for sex.
Indiana girl fifteen rescued after Patterson Man pays Uber to
bring her to New Jersey. Roadblocks was launched in the
early two thousands under the premise that games were the

(04:03):
next frontier for education software. Kids could design multiplayer online
enclaves using a set of building blocks and a simple
coding language. Unlike other companies complex graphics intensive games, roadblockses
were the kind of thing kids might imagine during recess,
like experienced gravity or work at a pizza place. The

(04:24):
platform's weird, whimsical ethos attracted thousands, then millions of kids
who moved through its worlds of Lego like avatars with
frozen smiles and beady eyes, spending roebucks to spruce themselves
up with virtual wigs, clothes, dragon tails, or wings. Eager
to access young eyeballs, big brands crafted their own games,

(04:45):
such as Gucci Town and Nike Land. Developers received a
thirty percent cut of any sales, and Roadblocks took the rest.
Bookings last year, mostly from roebucks, reached three point five
billion dollars with c seventy eight million daily active users. Today,
Roadblocks has become social media for the youngest generation. Every second,

(05:07):
according to roeblocks, it processes more than fifty thousand chat
messages Hey Loser, cute outfit Let's Be Friends through its
moderation protocols, a combination of artificial intelligence technology and human
workers that the company says scans all user content, including
audio and text. Roadblocks has about three thousand moderators, significantly

(05:30):
fewer than TikTok, which has three times the number of
daily users but employs forty thousand moderators. Roadblocks says the
number of moderators isn't an indicator of quality. Unlike other
mass market social media apps which bar kids under thirteen
or shunt them into sanitized versions, Roadblocks was made for children.

(05:51):
More than forty percent of its users are pre teens,
and with that market comes special hazards. Since twenty eighteen,
police in the US have around tested at least two
dozen people accused of abducting or abusing victims they'd met
or groomed using Roadblocks, According to data compiled by Bloomberg BusinessWeek,
some were already on sex offender registries or had been

(06:13):
accused of abusing miners. There were also a sheriff's deputy,
a third grade teacher, and a nurse. In just the
past thirteen months, there have been seven arrests, including those
of a man in Florida accused of trying to kidnap
a teen he played with on Roadblocks, a man charged
with abducting an eleven year old New Jersey girl he
met on the platform, and a California man who allegedly

(06:35):
abused a kid he too had met on Roadblocks. These
predators weren't just lurking outside the world's biggest virtual playground.
They were hanging from the jungle gym using roebucks to
lure kids into sending photographs or developing relationships with them
that moved to other online platforms and eventually offline. Roadblocks's

(06:55):
chief safety officer, Matt Kaufman, called safety and civility found
dations to the company. He notes that the platform's moderation
systems scan all chat and other digital content, bleeping out
inappropriate words and blocking players from sending images. Those systems,
which can intervene in under a minute, are even more
restrictive for kids under thirteen. Kaufman says he rejects the

(07:19):
idea that Roadblocks has a systemic problem with child endangerment,
and describes the issue as industry wide. Tens of millions
of people of all ages have a safe and positive
experience on Roadblocks every single day, he says. He declined
to comment on specific criminal cases, Yet a number of
people who've worked for Kaufman say Roadblocks is on its

(07:41):
back foot and its battle against predators. In interviews with
more than twenty current and former employees, including moderators, engineers,
and safety managers, all of whom requested anonymity because of
confidentiality agreements or fear of retribution from the company, BusinessWeek
repeatedly heard that while child safety might be the company's watchword,

(08:01):
policing the platform and its thirteen million games is a
Sissaphian task. One moderator says her team receives hundreds of
escalated reports involving child safety every day, far too many
for her team to clear. Policing will only get harder
as the company strives to reach co founder and chief
executive officer David Bazuki's goal of one billion daily users,

(08:24):
more than ten times the number today. Eight current and
former trust and safety workers say user growth at Roadblocks
takes priority over child safety. They describe calls for more
resources going unanswered, resulting in a backlog of incident reports
and the departure of one manager who left after promises
for extra staff went unfulfilled. Others say that features they

(08:46):
recommended to better protect kids, such as pop up safety notices,
were rejected, and that safety settings, for example, to ensure
users aren't talking to strangers, were switched off by default.
And while the company says it's increasingly relying on AI
for moderation and those systems are improving all the time,
some employees say the technology isn't yet able to detect

(09:08):
subtle signs of grooming. A Roadblock spokesperson disputes the claims
about resources and backlogs. The spokesperson says that safety team
members are constantly sharing ideas about new tools that the
company factors in various considerations when deciding how to build them,
and that it has a robust pipeline of safety features
in development. Implying that a lack of immediate integration of

(09:30):
specific ideas, tools, or features is a reflection of not
carrying or lack of prioritization is simply wrong, The spokesperson says.
Most of the safety workers interviewed by BusinessWeek say it's
harder to pursue pedophiles at roadblocks than at other online
platforms because every user is an anonymous collection of pixels.
That's the thing about catering to children. You can't ask

(09:53):
for real names, email addresses, or phone numbers at sign up.
This protects the privacy of children, but also predators. Before
Doc was wanted by the FBI, he was being hunted
by a posse of vigilante gamers they'd grown up playing Roblocks,
venting with one another about its poor moderation. They ridiculed

(10:14):
it for having overly strict chat filters, which they said
sometimes censored innocuous words yet didn't catch acronyms such as
ERP for erotic role play, and for failing to detect
avatars with absurdly large genitalia or simulating sex in digital
toilet stalls. By twenty twenty, many had lost faith that

(10:34):
roblocks could prevent predatory behavior, so they began policing it themselves.
The leader of this pack was Ben Simon now twenty seven,
who broadcasts about roadblocks on YouTube under the pseudonym Reuben
sim from a bungalow in suburban Tucson. Roadblocks spends so
much time, effort, and money convincing parents that their platform

(10:54):
is safer than it actually is, he says, sitting in
a gaming room smelling of marijuana and plastered with WikiLeaks
and rock music posters. Simon is a controversial figure. He
has mocked Roblock's employees for their physical appearance and sexual preferences,
and has hurled insults at Bazouki, who blocked him on X.
Roadblocks permanently banned Simon when he was seventeen. Since then,

(11:18):
he started new accounts, expanding his YouTube subscriber base to
one point two million, even as roblocks has shut him
down on its platform at least one hundred times. His
first videos were cringey satires of its games. Now they
have titles such as Uncovering Roblocks's nastiest community and Roblocks'
worst moderation problem, and he makes money from the ads.

(11:42):
Some Roblock's employees say they respect Simon's efforts, Others write
him off as a drama channel, a bad faith actor
who cares more about clicks than kids. But he says
users desperate for accountability have sent him thousands of complaints,
figuring they'll have better luck getting a creepy account shut
down if he posts about it than if they file
a report with roblocks. In September twenty twenty, Simon started

(12:06):
receiving messages from the gamers who were seeking to bring
Doc down. The screenshots they sent were of conversations Doc
had had with young girls who worked for him, including
one's detailing fantasies about kidnapping and raping a twelve year old.
After Simon reposted the messages on Twitter, vigilantes flooded Doc's accounts,
calling him a pedophile. Doc responded with a YouTube video

(12:29):
defending himself in his usual style, off screen with his
voice electronically altered. He admitted the messages were real, but
said they were just jokes. Simon packaged the allegations and
admission into a seven minute video and sent it to
an employee on Roblocks's developer relations team. He asked the
company to shudder the Doctor Rafatnik account and Sonic Eclipse itself.

(12:51):
A number of other users say they also alerted roeblocks
about Dox's account, and so did the mother of the
preteen he'd sent the messages to. Katie Berner, who's now eighteen,
says her mother sought advice from Simon before sending a
report explaining how creepy and dangerous it all was. Berner
had started playing roblocks when she was six and was

(13:12):
working for Doc by the time she was thirteen. At first,
she liked that he gave her so much attention, but
as she got older, Burner says she realized just how
gross it was for an adult to be talking to
me like this. Four days after being notified by Simon,
Roadblocks closed Doc's account and reported it to the National
Center for Missing and Exploited Children. In the meantime, Doc

(13:34):
had transferred ownership of the game to his friend and
created a new account. One gamer recalls him quoting eminem
after his return, guess who's back back again? Shady's back?
Tell a friend. Doc shared a screenshot on Twitter that
October after his band showing a fifteen thousand, ninety seven
dollars and thirty five cent payment from Roadblocks and scoffed

(13:56):
at Simon, thanks for driving more money to my game. Man, geez,
you guys are really effing stupid by giving me all
this publicity. Roadblock says it continued to search for and
ban any alternate accounts, but left Sonic Eclipse running because
the game itself didn't pose any safety concerns. It also
says that doctor Rofatnik cashed out a total of forty

(14:16):
one thousand dollars in developer fees in the first eight
months of twenty twenty, but that it has no record
of a payment to anyone for fifteen ninety seven dollars
and thirty five cents that year, Simon sent a message
to Roblocks railing against what he viewed as its weak response.
Rodblocks's bottom line depends on parents trusting the company with
their kid's safety, and that's not going to happen if

(14:38):
this is the response to child predators, he wrote. He
says he didn't get a reply. He tried reporting doc
to the Tucson Police, but all he could offer was
an online alias Robox finally responded to Simon in a
manner of speaking in late twenty twenty one by filing
a one point six million dollar lawsuit against him. It

(14:58):
alleged he was the leader of a cult like cyber mob,
harming the company's reputation. It also said he'd operated accounts
with names such as Kokasassin, tried to upload pictures of
Adolph Hitler, and used homophobic slurs inside Roeblocks games. Simon
says that his Couca Assassin count was created as a
joke when he was fifteen, that he never tried to

(15:19):
upload pictures of Hitler, and that he probably used a
few slurs while playing Roblocks as a kid. With Simon's sidelined,
others took up his campaign. If Roeblocks wasn't going to
do anything, I had to find a way, says Nauru,
a twenty two year old Japanese gamer who didn't want
her real name shared publicly for fear of being docked.
She settled on a different approach, writing to the vice

(15:41):
president for product development at Sega Sammy Holdings, which owns
the trademarks related to Sonic the Hedgehog, and tweeting at
its press relations team, their iconic hedgehog, she said was
being misappropriated by a pedophile on Roadblocks. Sega subsequently filed
a copyright infringement notice with Rope, and at the end
of twenty twenty one, the game was shut down. Sega

(16:04):
didn't respond to requests for comment, but Roblock's takedown notice
was shared by gamers online. The irony that Sonic Eclipse
had been brought down by the intellectual property rights of
a rival corporation rather than child safety concerns, wasn't lost
on the gamers. Simon settled his lawsuit with Roadblocks about
a month after the game went dark. Court documents show

(16:26):
he agreed to pay Roblocks one hundred and fifty thousand
dollars without admitting wrongdoing, though he won't comment on the
terms or whether he paid the company anything, citing a
confidentiality agreement. Roadblocks also declined to comment about the case.
The same week Simon settled the suit, he got a
tip from a fan. Five young sleuths from the US,

(16:46):
the UK, and Australia had discovered one of Doc's old
Facebook pages. It contained a link to a dormant website,
and when they'd looked up whom it was registered to.
They'd found a name, Arnold Castillo of Patterson, New Jersey.
I'mond called Tucson Police with the new information, but the
report went nowhere. A spokesperson for the force says that

(17:06):
there wasn't enough evidence to launch a criminal investigation and
that it was outside their jurisdiction. Simon says he hadn't
known who else to call. Who's playing roeblocks? Asks Kira Pindergast,
standing in front of seventy five students sitting cross legged
on an auditorium floor at an elementary school in lenox Head, Australia.
About sixty hands showed up. Who's ever been asked to

(17:29):
be someone's boyfriend or girlfriend on roadblocks? This time a
dozen hands go up and there's lots of whispering. Who's
been offered free roebucks to do something inappropriate in the game?
Two hands rise slowly. The session, captured in a video
in May, is like many others conducted by Pendergast, founder

(17:49):
and CEO of Safe on Social Media, an organization with
offices in four countries that advises schools and businesses about
online safety. I started asking more specific things, like who's
been offered free Roebucks to strip their avatar down to
their undies, and heaps of kids put their hands up giggling.
Pendergast says in an interview, hundreds of kids have told

(18:11):
her since the pandemic that they've been asked to shift
messaging from Roadblocks to Snapchat or discord, or have been
dared to do what she calls wildly inappropriate things such
as sending naked photos in exchange for roebucks. Parents are
letting children play on Roadblocks thinking it's a cute little
kid's game, with no idea what is really happening. Pendergast says,

(18:33):
if I could wipe one app off the face of
the earth right now, it would be that one. It
would be Roadblocks. Roadblocks's open chat function is a contentious
subject among child safety experts. Other kid focused online games,
such as Nintendo's Splatoon three, offer only pre programmed dialogue
options for talking with strangers on Roadblocks. An eight year

(18:55):
old can by default post whatever they want in a
game chat seen by every other player, unless AI sensors intervene.
It's left to parents to activate child safety features, such
as restricting what categories of people their kids can talk
to or which games they can play If parents don't,
children can introduce themselves to any stranger in a game,

(19:16):
chat for hours, and accept requests to converse in private messages.
If a predator wants to target younger kids and talk
with them to build trust and start the grooming process,
Roadblocks is an easy way to do that, says Ron Kerbs,
CEO and founder of online child safety company kid Us.
Instead of going to the playground where everyone's a kid,

(19:37):
you go to Roadblocks. Roadblocks is available for free on
a wide range of devices, from iPhones to PlayStations to PCs.
It takes less than a minute to create an account,
enter a date of birth, and join an all ages
rated game. A Business Week reporter signed up recently, identifying
herself as four years old, and rest into the popular

(19:58):
game Brookhaven. Art Her avatar appeared in a playground in
a sterile white city. The first message in a public
chat with twenty one other players was a user saying
I'm eight. The reporter replied, I'm four. The response of
one user was bleeped out. Leave the game and let's chat,
said another. Within seconds, a friend request arrived and a

(20:22):
private chat began. You single the stranger asked. The reporter
reiterated that she was four. Do you have ghost Chat,
the stranger asked, using a ghost emoji to refer to Snapchat,
which has a ghost logo. Age is just a number,
they added with a winking emoji. On darknet forums, adults

(20:42):
looking to groom children for abuse trade tips for developing
relationships in roeblocks chats, tactics such as misspelling certain words
l e. Capital ve instead of leave, or using emoji
to refer to apps where conversations can be unfiltered and
photos and videos can be sent. The ghost for Snapchat

(21:03):
a disc for discord. One forum user described successfully connecting
with kids there. I simply played the game or was
active in the chat section and then hit it off.
Others offer roebucks in exchange for pictures. Sometimes it worked
like a charm, wrote another poster on the same forum.
References to roebucks or roblocks gift cards twenty five dollars

(21:26):
for two thousand, roebucks one hundred dollars for ten thousand
appear in several police reports obtained by BusinessWeek. In one case,
Clinton McElroy, a forty eight year old registered sex offender
in Ellis, Kansas, met an eight year old girl on
Roadblocks in twenty twenty, he traded thousands of roebucks for
more than twenty explicit images and videos she'd shot of

(21:47):
herself using her iPad. In one exchange, he wrote, I
can tell you're not really into this, she responded, anything
for roebucks. Roadblocks says the company has no tolerance for
presatory behavior on the platform, but the word grooming didn't
appear in its twenty twenty two moderation guide, a copy
of which was seen by BusinessWeek, and the company didn't

(22:10):
have automated systems in place to proactively search for grooming
behavior beyond basic text filters until that year, according to
current and former employees. Several of them also say senior
leaders at roblocks haven't looked at how its virtual currency
is being used by predators, even though employees have raised
the issue with managers. A Roadblocks spokesperson says the company

(22:32):
is building out its capability and is looking to hire
a financial harms intelligence analyst. The spokesperson adds that consumer
privacy laws prevent retailers from sharing information on customers who
buy gift guards, making them hard to track. Predators who
do this have evaded detection. Shane Patrick Pinzak, a forty
five year old from Northport, Florida, was charged with sexual

(22:54):
crimes against children in January twenty twenty two. He told
police that a thirteen year old boy he'd met on
Roadblocks had shared his passwords so Penzac could put gift
cards onto his Roadblocks account. According to a transcript of
his taped confession, in exchange, he'd received hundreds of photos
and videos of the boy showering and performing sexual acts. Penzac,

(23:17):
who was sentenced to thirteen years, said he'd regularly signed
in to the boy's account to read his private messages
and pay him thousands of dollars worth of roebucks over
three years. We'll be right back with more of Roeblocks's
predator problem. Welcome back to Roeblocks's predator Problem. In May

(23:41):
twenty twenty two, four months after Penzac was arrested, a
missing person report was filed in Indiana. A fifteen year
old girl had disappeared. Her favorite electronics plus charger cables, clothing,
and a blanket were gone from her bedroom, her phone
was off, and the last thing she'd posted on Instagram
was a photo taken from the back seat of a

(24:02):
car captioned Goodbye Indiana. Stacy Hinshaw, a detective who specializes
in sex crimes, quickly realized this wasn't a typical teen runaway.
The girl didn't have the financial means to travel, yet
she'd clearly left the state someone had taken her. Hinshaw
got approval from a judge to access the teen's phone records.

(24:24):
The last tower her cell had pinged was in Pittsburgh,
three hundred and fifty miles away. She asked the girl's
family if she'd been talking to anyone online recently. Yes,
her sister said, a man named Jacob Shedletsky, who was
supposedly a popular game developer on Roadblocks Suspect number one.
Hinshaw thought the girl had met Shedletsky on Roadblocks that January.

(24:46):
The sister said she was an artist, and he'd bought
one of the drawings she'd posted on Instagram after calling
her mother to ask for permission, Shadletsky paid forty five
dollars through cash app. Then Amazon wackages started showing up
on the family's doorstep, addressed to the teen, containing a
Teddy Bear, a tablet, drawing stand, and a drawing glove. Occasionally,

(25:09):
orders from McDonald's or a Chinese restaurant would arrive via
door dash. By the end of that interview, I thought
she was with that man, Hinshaw recalls, we just had
to find him. She traced the gifts to the Amazon
account of a second man, Nelson Bettencour, with a Patterson address,
giving her another potential suspect. Then she called the phone

(25:30):
number the teen's mom had for Shadletski. The man who
answered confirmed the name and said he lived in California.
He said that he knew the girl and had sent
her gifts, but that he didn't know anything about her whereabouts.
Hinshaw recalls that he took a suspiciously long time to
provide basic information such as his address and date of birth.
When she asked the man why he'd sent the Amazon

(25:52):
gifts from a different account, he said Bettencour was a
business associate. A few days later, Meta Platforms returned the
results of a court ordered search warrant for the girl's
Instagram messaging history, and a third name popped up, doctor Rofatnik.
She'd sent him hundreds of messages. He said he was
in love with her and told her sex is a

(26:13):
beautiful thing. When she said she thought she might be
too young for intimacy. He replied, you're not. On April
twenty fifth, he wrote, I want to see you really badly.
The only way this is going to work is if
you listened to me. With enough evidence in hand, Hinshaw
called the Federal Bureau of Investigation and was put in
touch with Lynn Rothermick, a special agent on the Child

(26:35):
Abduction Rapid Response Team in Indiana. Rothermick soon discovered that
the girl had logged into her Instagram account from a
new IP address. He called the service provider's emergency office,
saying a teen's life was at risk and he needed
the account holder's location. When he got it, he saw
that the girl had logged in from the same address
used to send the Amazon packages. In the early evening

(26:57):
of May eleventh, eight days after the girl had l Indiana,
six unmarked cars carrying uniformed officers and FBI agents pulled
onto a quiet residential street in Patterson. Within minutes, they
saw her rounding a corner walking with a man. Officers
descended on the pair, separating them. The girl was taken
to a hospital. The man was put in handcuffs and

(27:19):
searched he was carrying three unused condoms. They asked him
for his name, Arnold Castillo. He replied Castillo, twenty two,
pale and dumpy with a thinning brown tangle of hair.
Was taken to an FBI office, where he agreed to
an interview without a lawyer. He admitted he'd adopted the
aliases Jacob Shedletzsky, Jaden Shedletsky, and doctor Rofatnik to hide

(27:43):
his identity. Castillo said that he'd use the Amazon account
of an uncle in Florida to send gifts to the girl,
and that he'd cut a side deal with an Uber driver,
paying one thousand dollars to bring her from Indiana to
New Jersey. He was a successful game developer on roeblocks.
Castillo told the FBI he had two dozen kids working
for him, helping design characters and manage Robucks payments for

(28:05):
a game he'd created. He described the girl as a
promising artist, unhappy living at home, and said he'd wanted
to help her. Castillo admitted they'd had sex multiple times
over the eight days she'd been missing. Rothermick listened to
the interview from Indiana. I was trying to figure out
how all this happened. He recalls how this girl was

(28:26):
willing to leave her home and go with this guy.
She doesn't know what was enticing about him. He started
searching Castillo's alter egos online and was surprised to find
not only that he was as popular as he'd said,
but also that a year and a half earlier, some
teen gamers had sounded an alarm about him. Seeing what
those children did as far as compiling all this and

(28:47):
their ability to identify mister Castillo, he says, well, they
might want to submit some applications to the FBI. One day,
a few weeks after the arrest, Rothermick found screenshots from
Roblocks games on Costello showing Castillo flirting with the team.
He'd been using the handle Last Outlaws, and their avatars
were holding hands or embracing in matching T shirts that

(29:10):
read boyfriend and girlfriend. Rothermick got a search warrant compelling
Roadblocks to turn over chatlogs, IP addresses, and log in
details for Last Outlaws. In the four months leading up
to the arrest, Rodermick learned Castillo and the girl had
exchanged messages on Roadblocks about her intention to run away
from home when executives at Roblocks's headquarters in San Mateo, California,

(29:33):
heard what had happened. They formed a team to analyze
what had gone wrong. The company says that it didn't
know who Castillo was before he was arrested, that it
didn't make payments to anyone with that name, and that
it has no records of accounts linked to him, But
executives knew they had to do something to better protect users.
They rolled out a policy permitting Roadblocks to boot users

(29:53):
who harass people on other platforms or offline. They also
gave moderators better tools to identify new accounts started by
banned users. Within a year, the company had created some
new roles, too, appointing two child safety investigators, a child
exploitation moderation team, and a Chief Safety officer reporting directly
to the CEO. With a stronger net in place and

(30:17):
the pandemic pulling in millions of new users, Roadblocks began
to catch more incidents. In twenty twenty three, it reported
thirteen thousand, three hundred and sixteen instances of child exploitation
to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, compared
with twenty nine hundred and seventy three the previous year.
The company says it responded last year to more than

(30:37):
thirteen hundred requests for information from law enforcement, including subpoenas
and search warrants, a jump of almost one third from
twenty twenty two. It didn't say how many of those
involved alleged predators. Current and former Roblocks employees say the
company wants to get safety right. Beyond the moral reasons,
there are business repercussions when it doesn't. After a short

(30:59):
sellar published a blog post last year that aggregated arrests
linked to Roadblocks, the company's share price fell eight percent.
Roadblocks says other factors may have caused a drop, but
there's only so much moderators can do. Because Roadblocks users
are mostly children, the company can't ask them for any
personal information beyond their age, and it can't ask those

(31:19):
under thirteen for proof of that. The username tab of
its sign up form even advises don't use your real name.
This anonymity shield makes it impossible to know if a
child is pretending to be an adult to sidestep safety guardrails,
or if an adult is pretending to be a child
for more sinister reasons, and when no one is who
they say they are, it's harder to detect suspicious behavior.

(31:43):
One safety moderator says it's common for predators to operate
dozens of Roadblocks accounts at the same time, pretending to
be children of different ages. Many safety advocates say Roadblocks
has been able to avoid the spotlight on child safety
issues because predators tend to shift sexual conversations with victims
to other, less moderated spaces. These critics consider it an oversight,

(32:05):
given that Roadblocks can act as a gateway to those
other platforms and its users are particularly young and vulnerable.
That the company wasn't called to a congressional hearing in
January where the CEOs of social media platforms were questioned
about online child exploitation. Spokespersons for Discord, snap TikTok, and
Meta say their platforms have features intended to keep children safe.

(32:27):
Discord closed the Sonic Eclipse server after BusinessWeek reached out
for comment. Roadblocks has also argued that federal laws protect
it from accountability in two lawsuits brought in the past
year by California parents alleging the company deceived them about
the safety of its platform its sites. Section two thirty
of the Communications Decency Act of nineteen ninety six, which

(32:49):
prevents Internet platforms from being held liable for what third
parties say or do on their sites. In one of
these cases, filed in state court in San Diego, the
lead play if alleged that anonymous users were sending her
seven year old son Lewde, messages via Roadblocks asking him
to show his genitals or perform virtual sex. In the other,

(33:10):
filed in federal court in San Francisco in February, plaintiffs
said they would never have given their children thousands of
dollars in roebucks had they known that the Roadblocks platform
was founded on the exploitation of their children. Roadblocks disputes
the allegations and has moved to have both cases dismissed.
A growing chorus of safety advocates, parents, teachers, attorneys, and

(33:32):
lawmakers is trying to hold tech companies accountable for the
harms their products have inflicted on children. In June, us
Surge and General Vivic Murthy called for warning labels on
social media sites, like those that appear on alcohol and
tobacco products, and some states and federal legislators have introduced
laws seeking to dilute section two thirty or force tech

(33:53):
companies to be more transparent about child safety. With its
liability shield under attack and with growth and in mind, Roadblocks
is making an effort to age up its user base.
Gamers over thirteen view it as a place for little kids.
According to a twenty twenty two internal research presentation seen
by BusinessWeek, we know Roadblocks becomes less cool as they

(34:14):
grow up, it said. One way to address that, the
presentation read, would be to provide more mature experiences adults
in particular, carry less regulatory risk and control their own
bank accounts. In the past year, Roadblocks has announced a
suite of features for users seventeen and up, including avatar
video calling, and games involving romantic themes and heavy bloodshed.

(34:39):
Safety workers say those who are pushing for growth want
as few barriers to entry as possible, and every time
the platform makes it easier for people to connect, they
maintain it becomes harder to police. The minute those things
were rolled out, one former child safety team leader says
of the new features for adults, our whole team was like,
dear God, no, please, Roeblocks don't do this. After all

(35:03):
the bravado and masquerading Castillo cut a pathetic figure at
the federal courthouse in Indianapolis last August when he pleaded
guilty to transporting a miner across state lines to engage
in sex with that the web of lies he'd created
finally came unwoven. No, he wasn't the brother of Roblock's
legend John Schadletski. No he didn't live in California or

(35:26):
drive around in flashy cars with a hot Spanish girlfriend.
No he wasn't buff with blonde hair and blue green eyes.
Reality wasn't as kind. Born in New Jersey, the son
of Spanish speaking immigrants, Castillo had been pulled out of
school in seventh grade by a controlling mother. His attorney said,
despite his lack of education, he'd found he had a

(35:47):
knack with computers and could make good money designing video games.
But Castillo had mental health issues and zero social confidence,
and he barely left the apartment he shared above a
garage with his mother, the two of them sleeping in
the same bed. He may have been king of an
online viftom, but he had no real friends. Federal Prosecutor

(36:08):
Tiffany Preston then laid out what investigators believed had happened
during the eight Day Ordeal. Shortly after the driver dropped
off the girl in New Jersey, Castillo took her to
a teeny tiny room he'd rented in the house adjacent
to his garage apartment and sexually assaulted her. Preston said
there were no blankets or furniture, only a dirty twin

(36:28):
mattress on the floor. The girl was dependent on him
for food and money. When she complained about being lonely,
Castillo bought her a plushy doll. He also bought her
hair dye to change her appearance. Preston called it every
parent's worst nightmare. The victim wasn't present in court, but
her sister was. In a statement she read to the judge,

(36:51):
She said the girl had been suffering from depression and
anxiety since being rescued. She almost doesn't want to come
out of her room. She'd lost trust in everyone, refused
to go to school. These scars will remain with her forever.
The family declined requests for an interview. Castillo's sentence should
be severe, Preston argued, to send a message about a

(37:12):
bigger social problem. It's gained some attention because it is
the poster child for how badly things can go wrong
when criminals can use supposed kids safe applications to talk
to children, She said, like millions of kids. Preston explained,
this teenager loved to play games on roadblocks, and that's
how Castillo had found and groomed her. Predators like the

(37:33):
defendant know that children are on these social media applications.
They know they're on roadblocks, and they're exploiting them every day,
Preston said. The judge sentenced Castillo to fifteen years. We
protect kids, he said, because they can't protect themselves. On
a Friday morning in June, Castillo was escorted into a

(37:56):
clammy visiting room at the Otisville Federal Correctional Institution in
upstate New York. He offered a coy smile and a
limp handshake. Hello, he said, in a buttery voice that
was nothing like the robotic tone he'd disguised it with online.
Now twenty four, he was wearing a dark brown jumpsuit
over a stocky frame, nowhere near the six foot one

(38:18):
he'd once regularly claimed. His dark eyes peered out from
behind rectangular glasses. Thin brown hair curled into wisps at
the nape. Of his neck. Not what you were expecting,
he asked. His looks were still a mystery to most people.
His mugshot had been sealed by the FBI, and all
the selfies he'd shared with fans were AI generated renditions

(38:39):
of Jaden Sdletsky, the alter ego behind doctor Rofatnik. Across
three hours, Castillo spoke mostly about his personal history, continually
drawing the conversation back to his unconventional childhood. He said
he'd built his Shdletsky identity on a mountain of lies,
starting when he was twelve. Everything I couldn't be was

(39:00):
superimposed onto him. Castillo said, I very much played a character,
and that character is long dead now. He'd had two
years in prison to think about his crimes, and he
said he was sorry for the pain he'd caused the
victim and her family. He said he didn't view himself
to have preyed on her, even though he knew his
actions were now considered a textbook case of online predatory behavior.

(39:25):
Castillo did have a few things to say about roadblocks
and why it might appeal to predators accessibility. For one,
it's very easy to make an account, he said, It's
very easy to play a game and very easy for
an adult to talk to a young person. It was
also easy to meet kids on the platform and shift
them to less moderated spaces. He said Roadblocks needed to

(39:48):
tighten its chat restrictions. He recalled simply using the word
chord instead of discord to evade the censors, but it
had been a long time since he'd used roeblocks, and
he figured he probably never would again. I think that
chapter in my life is done, he said. If he
serves his full sentence, he'll be close to forty by
the time he's released from prison, and he's had no

(40:11):
work experience beyond developing games on Roadblocks. That morning, he'd
started his first real job, cleaning the showers in his
cell block,