Roblox bans Chris Hansen's account during a live child safety demo at CrimeCon

Roblox banned an account being operated by Chris Hansen live on stage at CrimeCon in Las Vegas, cutting off a demonstration of how strangers approach users on the platform, Dexerto reports. Hansen, best known for hosting To Catch a Predator, has spent the past year investigating child safety concerns around Roblox alongside YouTuber Schlep, a creator whose sting-style videos target alleged predators using the game.

The panel took place on May 29, but the footage only spread widely after Schlep posted an August 15 video titled “Roblox BANNED Chris Hansen.” Schlep told the audience he could not run the account himself, because Roblox permanently banned him and issued a cease-and-desist in August 2025. He handed control to Hansen instead and directed him into a random chat experience called Ro-Meet.

After cycling through several users, Hansen was approached by an account that asked whether he had Snapchat. When Hansen questioned why the conversation should move off Roblox, the user replied, “IDK I am bored.” A few minutes later Hansen was disconnected, with an on-screen message reading “You have been kicked by this experience or its moderators.” Refreshing the Roblox homepage showed the demonstration account had been banned for “repeated or serious rule breaking,” under a moderation notice citing a Terms of Use violation for inappropriate content or behaviour.

Onstage, Schlep said a Roblox employee must have been watching the panel, but neither he nor Hansen produced evidence that the ban was issued manually. In the August 15 video, Schlep said he had spent ten minutes inside the same Ro-Meet experience hours before the panel on a separate account that drew no moderation action. He also said Ro-Meet was itself a re-upload of a version removed days earlier that had accumulated millions of visits, and that Roblox pulled the game about an hour after the panel, only for an identical copy to reappear the same night. The account that asked Hansen for Snapchat was still active when his video was published, Schlep said, while another user who appeared shortly before the disconnection was not banned until several days later.

Schlep also rejected Roblox's earlier suggestion that he sat on reports of violating experiences so he could use them in videos, saying he had reported random-chat games for more than a year, including to people connected to the company's safety council. Roblox has said his investigations violated its policies and could interfere with established safety procedures, and has since introduced further protections, among them mandatory facial age checks for chat.

Roblox has not publicly explained why Hansen's demonstration account was moderated. Pressure on the platform has continued regardless: on August 13 the US Senate opened an investigation into child safety on Roblox and ordered the company to preserve records connected to abuse, exploitation and bullying.