For newcomers
Start here
You have never opened Roblox, and you need to understand it by this afternoon. This page gives you the minimum: what it is, how the money works, the fifteen words that matter, and what to read next.
What Roblox is
Roblox is a free app, on phones, computers and consoles, that works less like a game and more like a shopping centre full of games. The company builds the centre. Almost everything inside it, millions of separate games, is made by its users, many of them teenagers.
A player creates one account and one cartoon character, their avatar, and takes both into any game they like. They can talk to other players by text and sometimes voice, add them as friends, and join groups.
Three facts explain most of what this series covers:
- It is enormous and very young. More than 100 million people use it daily, and roughly a third to two-fifths are under 13.
- Strangers of all ages share the same spaces. Separating them by age is a recent change.
- It has its own money, which can be bought with real money and, in limited ways, turned back into it.
How the money works
The currency is called Robux. A parent pays about $5 for 400. A child spends Robux on avatar clothing and on advantages inside games.
The people who make games and items earn Robux when players spend. Roblox lets approved creators convert earned Robux into dollars, at a rate less than a third of what the Robux cost to buy.
Two consequences follow. Anything bought with Robux has a real-money value. And anything that can be passed from one account to another can be stolen, sold or conned out of someone. That is the foundation of Parts 2 and 5.
The apps around it
Roblox does not exist alone. The most important neighbour is Discord, a chat app built around private group spaces called servers. Groups of Roblox players nearly always have one. Discord is less filtered than Roblox, allows images and video, and is where conversations that begin in a game usually continue. Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube play smaller parts.
When something goes seriously wrong for a child on Roblox, it has very often gone wrong on one of these other apps, after starting on Roblox.
Fifteen words to know
- Experience
- Roblox's official word for a single game on the platform. Players just say "game".
- Avatar
- A player's character. How it is dressed signals status and group membership.
- Robux
- Roblox's currency, bought with real money.
- Username, display name and user ID
- Three different things. The display name can be changed freely, the username occasionally, the numeric user ID never. Only the ID reliably identifies an account.
- Friend or connection
- A player you have added. Friends can see when you are online and join you.
- Group or community
- A club of players with a page, ranks and a shared name tag.
- Private server
- A copy of a game that only invited players can enter.
- Premium
- A paid monthly membership that includes Robux and the ability to trade items.
- Discord
- A separate chat app where most Roblox communities actually organise.
- Grooming
- An adult building a child's trust in order to abuse or exploit them.
- Sextortion
- Blackmail using a sexual image, typically to obtain more images or money.
- Condo game
- A user-made game built for sexual role-play. Banned, and constantly re-uploaded.
- Age check
- Roblox's requirement, since January 2026, to prove age by ID or a facial scan before using chat.
- NCMEC
- The US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which receives platforms' reports of suspected child exploitation.
- 764
- The best known of several online networks that coerce children into self-harm and abuse for status. Classed by the FBI as violent extremists.
The full glossary has every term used in the series.
What to read next
| If you are… | Read |
|---|---|
| A parent with ten minutes | How grooming tends to work and what parents can do, both in Part 1. |
| A parent whose child lost items or money | Part 5, then how not to get robbed in Part 2. |
| A parent whose child is in a "crew" | The ordinary or worrying table in Part 4. |
| A teacher or youth worker | The professional briefing, then Parts 3 and 4. |
| A journalist or researcher | The chronology and the source register, then Part 1. |
| Working a case | The identifiers and evidence sections of the briefing. |
How to read the articles
Each article opens with a short "In plain terms" summary and a list of key facts. Next comes a table headed "How solid is this?", which marks each main claim as one of three things:
- Documented Established by official figures, a court outcome, the company's own statements, or reporting by a named publisher.
- Alleged Claimed by one side, in a lawsuit or by a party with an interest, and denied or untested.
- Observed Community behaviour described from public games, servers and videos, with no published source behind it.
The difference matters. A lawsuit is an accusation. A settlement is not an admission. And a description of how teenagers behave in a game is one writer's observation, however accurate it seems.