Fairplay and NCSE have requested that the FTC look into Roblox regarding child safety concerns and allegations of ‘unfair and deceptive’ marketing practices.

      The complaint charges the gaming platform with misleading the public regarding its safety and pressuring young users to spend money. Roblox “strongly disputes” these allegations, while the FTC has chosen not to comment.

      According to a report by Reuters, two children’s advocacy organizations, Fairplay and the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, urged the US Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday to look into Roblox. They described the gaming platform's design and marketing strategies as “unfair and deceptive” in their letter.

      The groups are requesting that the agency assess whether Roblox has breached Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, which prohibits unfair or deceptive business practices impacting commerce.

      The two main issues in the complaint are that Roblox misleads the public about the safety of its platform and exerts unfair pressure on young users to spend money for in-game benefits.

      The advocacy groups have submitted relevant materials to the FTC under docket 2026-00096. An FTC spokesperson declined to provide a comment to Reuters.

      Roblox insisted that it “strongly disputes” the allegations laid out in the letter, with a representative noting that US users must undergo an age check before they're able to chat with other players, and that minors can only chat with individuals close to their own age.

      The age-verification system is built on a facial estimation technology that Roblox rolled out earlier this year via Persona, which classifies users into one of six age categories and is designed to eliminate the original biometric data once processed.

      This complaint adds to a growing regulatory and legal challenge that has been developing around Roblox over the past year.

      Roblox is currently facing more than 140 lawsuits in US federal court, with accusations of knowingly enabling child sexual exploitation, as plaintiffs allege the platform was designed and marketed in a way that allowed predators to target and reach minors.

      Attorneys general from Texas, Louisiana, Florida, Kentucky, Iowa, Tennessee, Nebraska, and Arkansas have also filed separate lawsuits against the company regarding failures in child safety.

      The age-check system that Roblox cites as its defense has come under scrutiny. The required age-gated chatting tiers have been undermined by a secondary market for pre-verified accounts, with age-verified Roblox logins being sold on eBay for as little as $4 shortly after the mandate took effect.

      The Persona-based facial estimation system also failed to guarantee that the user behind the camera is the same person registered to the account, a point both Fairplay and the NCSE highlighted in their broader critique of the platform.

      The international regulatory environment is even more stringent. In March, the UK's Ofcom included Roblox in its communications to major platforms aimed at increasing child safety, alongside Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube.

      The enforcement of the Online Safety Act has led to fines of £520,000 against 4chan and £1.05 million against the AVS Group over the past six months due to age-check failures.

      The FTC complaint aligns with a similar enforcement trajectory in the US, where Section 5 cases usually take between 12 to 36 months to yield a public order if the agency formally opens an investigation.

      The Fairplay-NCSE letter does not specify a timeline for FTC action, and the agency has not indicated whether it will initiate a formal investigation. The next discernible step in the process is a public response from the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, which could take weeks or months.

      Roblox’s ongoing lawsuits, totaling over 140 in federal court, remain on separate dockets and are not impacted by the FTC referral; the next scheduled consolidated motion hearings in the federal multidistrict cases will serve as more immediate indicators of how the overall child safety concerns regarding the platform are progressing.