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LAS VEGAS — When Livingston Parish deputies executed a search warrant at a suspect’s home, they discovered him actively using voice-changing technology to pose as a teen girl while communicating with a real child online— exactly the crime they had come to arrest him for.
“He had a 14-year-old girl on the phone, he was basically disguising his voice, and that’s what’s so scary with these devices out there, these apps, that it will have no consequences,” said Livingston Parish Sheriff Jason Ard. “And this kid had no idea they were talking to a 40-something-year-old man.”
Investigators say the suspect was actively on Roblox, an online gaming app popular with children, according to authorities. And the suspect, a registered sex offender, shouldn’t have been using it.
That device that we now have in our hands that we give in our children is the white van, right? That is the white van. It is now at your dinner table. It’s now in your bedroom.
Roblox says its platform does not include any kind of voice modulation, but the case is part of the state’s lawsuit against the game company.
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A statewide crackdown on child sex predators led to the arrest and highlights a disturbing national trend, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill told Fox News Digital last weekend at CrimeCon Las Vegas.
“This is not a victimless crime,” she said. “There are children who are being victimized to produce pornography that’s being traded, and there are children who are getting raped and hurt in a number of ways.”
She described cases where children are lured from their homes hundreds or thousands of miles away before they are rescued.
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Murrill said Louisiana is on track to receive 90,000 tips about online child exploitation this year alone, with 30,000 already processed by the end of May. And police across the state have made hundreds of arrests.
In many cases, the parents are blindsided and don’t know what to look out for.
“When we all grew up, we always look for the white van, the ice cream truck, things of that nature,” said Ard, who was also at CrimeCon, where the attorney general joined former “To Catch a Predator” host Chris Hansen for a panel on fighting child sex crimes.
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“Now we have this internet-based platform,” Ard continued. “That device that we now have in our hands that we give in our children is the white van, right? That is the white van. It is now at your dinner table. It’s now in your bedroom.”
The Louisiana crackdown has targeted known, registered sex offenders — predators who aren’t allowed to be using social media or gaming apps, authorities said. But they make their way online anyway, because that’s where the victims are.
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“These big companies, like Roblox, they’re not doing anything about it,” Ard said. “So we have to take the initiative to do what we can to stop this.”
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Roblox is not the only app that authorities allege predators are using to harm children; however, it is wildly popular among kids and teens.
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The company has also been named in several lawsuits — including one Murrill herself filed last summer — which allege that the platform is an environment where predators can target vulnerable children.
Roblox disputed the characterization of its platform as unsafe, telling Fox News Digital that the allegations “fundamentally misrepresent how our platform works and fail to take into account the extensive, proactive measures we are pioneering and implementing to set a new standard in online safety.”
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Last year, Roblox CEO David Baszucki told FOX Business the company had implemented more than 100 new safety features to protect its users — about 40% of whom are under age 13.
“Video and image sharing between users has always been prohibited on Roblox,” a spokesperson said Wednesday. “Roblox’s technology makes it impossible for users to share images or videos in chat.”
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The company also relies on a blend of AI-powered detection and human moderators to prevent users from exchanging personal information, and the spokesperson said Roblox cooperates with law enforcement around the country and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC).
Roblox chats are unencrypted and monitored around the clock, according to the spokesperson.
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“Earlier this year, Roblox became the first online gaming platform to require age checks for all users to access chat features so that younger users are limited to chatting only with peers by default,” the spokesperson said. “Chat is disabled by default for users under nine.”
Fox News’ Daniella Genovese contributed to this report.
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