WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT. As Carlo Tritta is jailed for 28 months after grooming a girl using Roblox, the Mirror takes a look at some of the cases that have escalated concern over the online game
A 19-year-old who used the gaming platform Roblox to groom a young girl has been jailed for 28 months, sparking fresh shudders among parents.
The sentencing of Carlo Tritta has pulled back the curtain on a series of catastrophic safety failures on the platform, ranging from predatory grooming to the glorification of school shooters.
Tritta, from Eastleigh, began targeting the 14-year-old victim in September 2024. What began as a in-game chat on Roblox escalated into a toxic obsession that saw the teenager travel across the country to the girl’s family home to threaten them in person.
Tritta “love-bombed” the teenager with gifts, phone calls and “highly sexualised’ messages on platforms such as Snapchat, Discord and WhatsApp, making her believe that they were in a relationship.
After the girl’s mother discovered intimate images and videos, she reported him to police. In August 2025, Tritta was arrested and subsequently bailed under strict conditions not to contact the girl or her mum, all while officers investigated the contents of his seized phone.
However, matters continued to escalate. Obsessed Tritta proceeded to contact the girl’s friends via social media, calling and texting her multiple times, despite being forbidden to do so, and even sending her two cards via Moonpig in an attempt to get her to drop the case. Tritta even went as far as to report the girl’s mother to child services. He also made contact with police, trying to get the investigating officer taken off the case.
Taking things a step further, Tritta travelled to the girl’s home in Manchester on September 5, letting himself inside through the back door. When the girl asked him to leave, he initially did so, before returning 10 minutes later and demanding her new number. She refused to give this to him, but agreed to go to a nearby pub with him, just to get him away from the family home.
The next morning, while putting the bins out, the girl’s mother caught sight of Tritta ducking behind a garage and confronted him. He left before the police were called.
Tritta was subsequently arrested and charged with perverting the course of justice, which he admitted in court, and was handed a 12-month suspended sentence on December 11.
Just three days later, however, he made the journey to Manchester once more, entering the girl’s home and confronting both her and her mum, before damaging a CCTV camera.
He was arrested again and later pleaded guilty to three counts of making indecent images of a child, engaging in sexual communications with a child, and causing a child aged 13 to 15 to watch or look at a sexual image. He admitted witness intimidation and criminal damage.
In a victim impact statement, the girl said she “felt trapped and upset” and was “scared of going downstairs at night” because she thought the defendant would be there.
The mother, who cannot be named for legal reasons, told how she discovered Tritta’s contact with her daughter after the child became depressed, stopped sleeping well and had suicidal thoughts.
The mother said: “I feel like my daughter has been in some kind of abusive, controlling, coercive relationship with somebody who’s a lot older. I don’t feel safe in my own house, I’ve got cameras up, I’ve got to think about safeguarding, I’ve had to change times of school pickup, when I drop off, I just get jumpy in my own house.”
She said of Roblox: “To me, I just thought it’s a child’s game. I did not think for one minute that these older people, paedophiles, are essentially grooming on these games and contacting these children. I try to tell as many people as possible. Watch what your children are playing; they can be dangerous. I thought, my girl, she gets high grades in school, she can be a bit of a moody teenager but she doesn’t go out. I just thought how lucky am I that I’ve got my daughter at home with me and she’s safe, but I’m in my bedroom and she’s in the other and all this is happening to her.”
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DC Jodi Bartlett, who investigated the case, said: “Tritta’s behaviour lays bare the terrifying realities of how criminals use the online world to target and harm vulnerable people. Do you truly know who you, or your child, is speaking to online?
Horrifyingly, this isn’t the first case involving Roblox that has sparked concern, with previous incidents connected to unimaginable tragedy.
‘Innocent’ teenager who ‘snapped’
According to mum, Jaimee Seitz, her daughter Audree Heinee had been an ordinary, happy teenager. Then she ended up falling down a dark rabbit hole into the world of online extremist groups, with tragic consequences. On December 2, 2024, Jaimee entered every parent’s worst nightmare when 13-year-old Audree, described as her “best friend”, died by suicide.
Sadly, there were more shocks to come when, one week later, detectives sat devastated, Jaimee down and told her Audree had become involved in a group called True Crime Community (TCC). Jaimee, from Kentucky, told FOX 12: “It’s a group that glorifies school shooters, romanticises them, obsessed with them, and they feed off of each other.”
Glued to her computer in the days that followed, Jaimee learned of how TCC participants are encouraged to either die by suicide, or take the lives of others through school shootings or bombings. It was a mentality she just couldn’t square with her “beautiful, happy, seemingly innocent daughter”, who’d loved to dance, draw and make others laugh. She feels as though “something snapped” within Audree before her tragic death.
Wanting to understand, Jaimee read Audree’s diary, where she learned the youngster had first encountered TCC members via Roblox, before following them to Discord and TikTok. The diary entries felt a world away from the girl Jaimee had known, a girl she says wouldn’t have harmed a living soul. According to Jaimee, who is now suing Roblox: “I never want Audree to be seen that way, or in that light, because that’s not who she was. She took her own life because of being groomed and being told she had to.”
School shooter horror
On Wednesday, February 11, 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar committed one of the worst school shooting atrocities in Canadian history. It later emerged that they’d used Roblox to plan for the chilling attack, which left eight people dead. The twisted teenager, who had previously set fire to their family home in a bid to kill their own parents, brutally killed their 11-year-old stepbrother and 39-year-old mum, Jennifer Strang, before continuing their rampage at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in British Columbia.
Here, they slaughtered five students and a teacher, while injuring a further 25 people. Van Rootselaar, who identified as female, then turned the gun on themselves, dying by a self-inflicted gunshot. As detectives worked to establish a motive behind such a diabolical crime, it emerged that Van Rootselaar had previously used Roblox to create a mass shooting simulator, set against the backdrop of a virtual shopping mall.
As reported by 404 Media at the time, users of this simulator could pick up weapons, in the guise of their Roblox avatars, and shoot at each other. When approached by The Guardian about this revelation, Roblox issued the following statement: “We have removed the user account connected to this horrifying incident, as well as any content associated with the suspect. We are committed to fully supporting law enforcement in their investigation.”
The company said that the “Mall experience” was only accessible through Roblox Studio, a separate app used by developers for building games, with this particular simulator recording just seven visits. Roblox added that it uses both AI and a team of safety specialists to review any uploaded content before it is shown to other users.
Sick Jeffrey Epstein content
Earlier this year, TMZ reported that a Roblox user had created an in-game version of Little Saint James, Jeffrey Epstein’s notorious island, where the convicted sex offender allegedly trafficked his victims. The so-called “Saint Silverlemon Isle” includes several cabanas, a yacht, a secret underground temple, and a villa with a massage table. According to the game description, players must “survive Jeffery the Killer and Donald on the island”, making reference to the one-time friendship between paedophile Epstein and President Donald Trump.
According to a lawsuit in August 2025, Roblox had more than 900 user profiles registered with variations of Epstein’s name, plus hundreds of games themed around Sean “Diddy” Combs, The Mirror US reports. The lawsuit claims “Roblox is fully aware that these experiences pervade its app, and it allows them to continue to exist unchecked despite the ability to control or eliminate them,” and it claims that the consequences for kids can be catastrophic.
Groomed by sexual predator
Remembered as a “bright, imaginative boy”, Ethan Dallas began playing Roblox at the age of nine years old, with parental controls in place. Sadly, things took a harrowing turn when the Californian schoolboy was 12 years old, with “an adult sex predator” targeting him on the platform, while pretending to be a child.
According to a lawsuit that has since been filed against Roblox by Ethan’s mother, Becca Dallas, back in September, while conversations began innocently enough, things “gradually escalated to sexual topics and explicit exchanges.” As previously reported by NBC News, the paedophile eventually persuaded Ethan to turn off parental controls and to chat with him over Discord. It was here that the adult predator “increasingly demanded explicit photographs and videos”, threatening Ethan that he’d share the images if he didn’t do what he said. Ethan complied with these instructions out of fear, with the ordeal taking a terrible toll.
Sadly, on April 3, 2024, Ethan, remembered in his obituary as someone who “brought joy and laughter to all who knew him”, died by suicide at the age of just 15 years old. As detailed in the complaint, the teenager, of San Diego County, had been “permanently harmed and haunted” by his experiences of being groomed online.
This lawsuit accuses both Roblox and Discord of wrongful death, fraudulent concealment and misrepresentations, negligent misrepresentation and strict liability, arguing that, had Roblox and Discord taken steps to screen users before allowing them access to apps, or introduced measures such as age and identity verification, “Ethan would have never interacted with this predator, never suffered the harm that he did, and never died by suicide.”
Speaking to the Mirror in light of the recent Carlo Tritta case, mum Becca shared: “Ethan’s case is just one of far too many, and what’s most heartbreaking is that it didn’t have to happen. Companies like Roblox have had the resources and the reach to prioritise children’s safety from the beginning – but instead, it feels like profit has come first.
“There has been a lack of urgency, accountability, and genuine care. It’s hard to understand how a company of that size did not already have stronger protections in place to prevent the kinds of harm we are now seeing – children being exploited, manipulated, and tragically, some losing their lives. Why did it take so many children being harmed for action to even begin? And even now, for many families, it feels like too little, too late.”
She continued: “This doesn’t just impact the children – it devastates entire families. When a child is lost, the ripple effects are lifelong. Parents, siblings, loved ones – they carry that pain every single day. Many families struggle with overwhelming grief, guilt, and trauma, questioning what they could have done differently, when the reality is that these platforms should have been safer from the start. Ethan mattered. Every one of these children matters. And their stories deserve to be heard – not just as statistics, but as lives that should have been protected.
“For Ethan, the man who harmed Ethan is not in jail. He is in the mental hospital because he’s claiming he’s mentally sick, mind you. From what I’m hearing, he had a really strong desire to play this stuff, and that’s what’s sad. He’s never seems like he’s not gonna pay for what he’s done I want us. It’s just like all these families in justice.”
A spokesperson from The Cyber Helpline told the Mirror: “Cases like this are deeply concerning, and unfortunately not isolated. Platforms like Roblox are designed to be social and immersive – that’s part of their appeal. But those same features are the ones that create opportunities for harm when the proper safeguards are not in place.
“One of the key risks is the ease of initiating contact with minimal friction on platforms, often without needing to be connected as friends. And even when adding someone as a friend is a requirement, young people do not always understand the risks of who they are adding, excited at the opportunity to make a new friend or curious at who they are.
“While there are safety settings in place, for example, features that require parents or carers to approve friends, these are not always fully understood, consistently applied or robust enough. Ultimately, the onus is, far too often, on parents, carers and young people themselves to turn on safety settings. This is not good enough, and platforms should commit to turning on safety settings by default.
“There are also challenges around moderation and enforcement of platform policies. Platforms operating at a large scale face difficulties identifying harmful behaviour and safety systems are too often reactive rather than preventative, relying on young people to report, when they may not realise themselves that they are experiencing harmful behaviour. We need platforms to become safer by design, with improved detection of grooming and harmful behaviours, clearer and more accessible reporting and help tools, and greater transparency from platforms about how risks are managed. Ultimately, safeguarding needs to be treated as a must-have, not an optional add-on.”
When approached for comment, a Roblox spokesperson told the Mirror: “We are deeply saddened to hear of this troubling case. Criminal behaviour has no place on Roblox. Since January, Roblox has required all users to go through age checks in order to communicate on our platform, with the system designed to limit communications to people of similar ages and those they already know. Our policies firmly prohibit any kind of child exploitation, and we have extensive safety systems in place to help prevent user-to-user image sharing and limit chat for younger users, with our teams working closely with law enforcement to support investigations.
“While no system is perfect, we continue to evolve and strengthen our protections every day. For example, last year we added advanced AI systems designed to detect and prevent grooming and stricter chat protections that block personal information sharing and attempts to move conversations off-platform, where moderation standards may be less stringent.”
For emotional support, you can call the Samaritans 24-hour helpline on 116 123, email jo@samaritans.org, visit a Samaritans branch in person or go to the Samaritans website.
Do you have a story to share? Email me at julia.banim@reachplc.com
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