Illegal casinos are using Roblox to draw children into online gambling
Illegal online casinos are using Roblox, one of the most popular video games in the world, to draw children as young as 12 into online gambling, a Sky News investigation has found.
Warning: This article contains a mention of suicide.
The unlicensed casinos allow children of any age to sign up using their Roblox accounts and bet their in-game currency (Robux) on games like slots and blackjack.
Winnings can be withdrawn as cryptocurrency – and then converted into real cash.
Roblox is one of the most popular video games in the world, with an estimated 80 million daily active users. Described by its CEO as a “digital playground,” Roblox is particularly popular with children – 42% of its users are thought to be aged 12 or under.
Sky News spoke to one teenage Roblox user in the US who says he gambled around 15 million Robux (£150,000). He started using the sites aged just 14 – seven years below the legal age for gambling in his state.
Robert, 16, says he started gambling on the websites aged 14, and has bet around 15 million Robux (£150,000)
“My mother tried to get me to stop, but I didn’t,” says Robert*. “I just liked the adrenaline of doing bigger and bigger bets.”
He had no idea, he says, that he was committing a criminal offence.
“I just thought it was something you could do to make extra money,” he says. “I didn’t even know what gambling was.”
Sky News’ investigation focused on three of the largest Robux casinos – BloxFlip, Bloxmoon and RBLXWild. Altogether, the sites receive around 2.8 million visitors each month and facilitate millions of pounds worth of bets.
In response to Sky News’ findings, the Gambling Commission has launched an urgent investigation into the Robux casinos and has blocked them from the UK.
“Criminals will always try and find new ways to exploit people, including children,” the regulator’s chief executive Andrew Rhodes told Sky News.
Sky News was able to access data from one of these casinos, Bloxmoon, showing that users have lost a total of $11.4m (£8.9m) on the website since it launched in late 2022.
The data includes bets placed on RBLXWild since July 2024, when this website was purchased by Bloxmoon.
Between April and October 2024 alone, users placed bets worth $22.3m. The casinos’ owners paid out only $20.1m as winnings, keeping the remaining $2.2m as revenues. That’s an average revenue of $10,281 (£8,149) per day.
Other casinos may be making even more money. Of the eight casinos identified by Sky News, the most popular is BloxFlip, which receives an average of 2.7 million visitors every month according to website analytics company SimilarWeb.
BloxFlip announced it was permanently shutting down less than 36 hours after Sky News presented its findings to the casino and to Roblox.
“The legal team representing Roblox has begun to apply pressure compelling us to close our platform,” a co-owner of BloxFlip wrote in the casino’s official chatroom.
“No more luring minors in and giving them addictions early,” responded one user, who had bet more than 10 million Robux (£100,000) on the site.
A spokesperson for Roblox told Sky News that the casinos are “in no way endorsed or authorised by Roblox” and that the company has taken “numerous steps to disrupt their activity, which violates our Terms of Use”.
“We have a dedicated group focused on identifying potentially fraudulent activity on Roblox and we work collaboratively with law enforcement authorities where possible to pursue the owners of such websites,” the spokesperson said.
“Our efforts have met with some success, but we would welcome further law enforcement action and vigilance from web hosting providers to shut down sites like this.”
Bloxmoon users have lost a total of $11.4 million (£8.9 million) on the website since it launched in late 2022
Unlicensed casinos have ‘no safeguards’
Robert says he started gambling on BloxFlip after seeing an advertisement on social media.
“At first I deposited around 100 Robux (£1) – just something small to try it out,” he says.
“I lost it all. Then I deposited more to try to make up for it, which I lost again. Then I deposited more.”
Soon, he was gambling with his friends every night.
One time, Robert says, a friend threatened to kill himself after losing 20,000 Robux (£200) on a single roulette spin. It wasn’t clear if he was serious, but the group didn’t want to get adults involved for fear of revealing their gambling habits.
“We just tried to calm him down ourselves,” Robert recalls.
Dr Jane Rigbye, chief executive of underage gambling charity YGAM, says that unlicensed casinos have no safeguards in place. This means they are “potentially much more dangerous, both financially and psychologically,” than regulated casinos.
“If children are exposed to gambling at an earlier age, they’re more likely to experience difficulties with gambling later in life,” she adds.
‘Nobody cared’
Robert has no doubt that the websites’ staff know many of their users are underage, based on conversations in the group’s official chatroom on the social media platform Discord.
“There’d be people [in the Discord group] talking about their age in casual conversations with the moderators, the developers of the site,” he says. “They didn’t care. Nobody cared.”
In the BloxFlip Discord users who have wagered at least a million Robux (£10,000) can apply for “Whale” status, giving them a special whale emoji next to their username. Users who have wagered at least 10 million Robux (£100,000) can apply for “Platinum Whale” status.
At least four Whales and two Platinum Whales have openly admitted to being underage in the Discord group.
“I was here since 12 [years old] lol I’m 14 now,” wrote one user, whose screenshots show that he has bet at least 1.1 million Robux (£11,000) on the site.
Another user who is shown to have wagered at least 17.5 million Robux (£175,000), says he turned 16 in November.
He added: “Is it even [worse] that I’m an underage gambler and I have plat whale?!?!?!”
A staff member with the title “head of community” even acknowledged that one “Whale” was underage. After the user stated his height, the staff member said: “you are 14 right you probably got a bit to grow still.”
The user’s screenshots show he has bet more than 5.2 million Robux (£52,000) on the site.
Roblox is being sued over the websites
Roblox is now fighting a class action lawsuit in the US by the parents of five children who used these casinos.
The lawsuit, originally filed in August 2023, was given permission to proceed in September 2024 after a judge ruled that Roblox had to answer the parents’ accusations of negligence.
“They knew for years it was happening, and they didn’t do anything,” says James Bilsborrow, the lawyer leading the case against Roblox.
“Roblox has created a digital playground for children – that’s the purpose of their platform,” he says. “They have a duty to these kids, a duty to keep them safe.”
Court filings show that Roblox has been aware of BloxFlip and RBLXWild since at least April 2022, when it contacted their hosting providers asking that the sites be shut down.
It was only in October 2024, however, that Roblox initiated legal proceedings against the websites – accusing them of copyright infringement and breaking its terms of use.
Roblox denies all wrongdoing and says it “employs multiple methods to detect and disrupt bot accounts” connected with the gambling websites.
The parents suing Roblox are also taking legal action against the gambling websites, but so far none of the websites’ owners have responded to the lawsuit.
One of BloxFlip’s owners told the website’s users on their chatroom that “many companies get sued” and that it is “part of doing business”.
Taking the websites down
The Bloxmoon website only went offline on 26 November, after Sky News alerted the Gambling Commission which then sent its own takedown request to the website’s hosting provider.
Dozens of users flooded Bloxmoon’s official chatroom, with one asking if the site had been “taken down by the federal government”.
Within 36 hours, however, the website re-emerged at a slightly different web address. RBLXWild was later also taken down only to re-appear at another new address.
The websites continued to receive thousands of dollars worth of bets until 2 December, when users again began complaining that the site was blocked in certain countries, including the UK.
One of the website’s staff told users in the official chatroom that they could get around the block by using free software that masks a computer’s location.
“If you are unable to access the website please use [the software], certain regions could be blocked at this time,” one of the website’s staff said in the official chatroom. “We are handling the situation.”
Sir Iain Duncan Smith, who leads a parliamentary group on gambling-related harms, says that the casinos will continue to pose a risk as long as the owners are able to escape accountability.
Sir Iain Duncan Smith told Sky News regulators need to have greater powers to track down and punish illegal casino owners
“What you have to do is take them out of the game, so they can’t just move domains,” says Sir Iain. “There needs to be greater powers to seek these people out, arrest them and put them inside.”
Chief executive of the Gambling Commission, Andrew Rhodes, says the regulator is working to identify the casinos’ real owners.
“At the end of the day, illegal casino operators are criminals,” he says.
“They’re supported by criminal gangs and are part of the criminal underworld. It’s important all of us play our part in trying to frustrate them.”
That includes parents, who Mr Rhodes says need to be “vigilant” to what their children are doing online. But platforms like Roblox also need to safeguard the people using their services, he added.
“They have to remember that criminals are always trying to find ways to exploit children and others and be alive to that risk.”
Andrew Rhodes, chief executive of the Gambling Commission
‘The adrenaline kept him going’
Robert says he quit after realising that gambling had become an obsession.
“I just wasn’t getting the same feeling when I did other things, compared to when I was gambling at home on a Roblox casino,” he says.
He now regrets getting his friends involved, especially one for whom gambling is against their religion.
“He knew he shouldn’t be doing it, but the adrenaline kept [him] going,” Robert remembers. “Then he lost it all in one night, unfortunately.”
While he’s done with Roblox gambling for good, he does see himself gambling at a legal casino in the future.
Would he have said that if he’d never gambled with Robux?
He pauses to think. “Probably not.”
Anyone feeling emotionally distressed or suicidal can call Samaritans for help on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org in the UK. In the US, call the Samaritans branch in your area or 1 (800) 273-TALK
Anyone concerned about their gambling, or that of a loved one, can visit BeGambleAware.org for free, confidential advice and support, or The National Gambling Helpline is available on 0808 8020 133 and operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
*Not his real name
The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent journalism from Sky News. We gather, analyse and visualise data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite images, social media and other open source information. Through multimedia storytelling we aim to better explain the world while also showing how our journalism is done.
Britain’s ambassador to the United States will use a keynote speech today to underline the UK-US special relationship – while also attempting to ‘Reform-proof’ his own struggling government.
Lord Mandelson, the architect of New Labour, master of political spin and now Britain’s man in Washington, will use the 2025 annual lecture at Ditchley Park to offer a positive spin on a presidency which has proudly upended norms and frayed alliances.
In the speech, parts of which have been released in advance, Mandelson will describe President Trump as a “risk taker” with an “iron-clad stomach”.
Lord Mandelson was chosen as ambassador by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer late last year. He is a political appointee rather than a career diplomat.
And with intriguing language he will offer his take on the parallels between Trump and Starmer’s challenges and mandates.
He will say: “I credit President Trump’s political instincts in identifying the anxieties gripping not only millions of Americans, but also far more pervasive Western trends: economic stagnation for many, a sense of irreversible decline, the lost promise of meaningful work…
“These American concerns find their mirror image in British society, where Keir Starmer won an electoral mandate for national renewal which is similar to Donald Trump’s.”
Yet Mandelson delivers the speech at the end of a week when Nigel Farage was in town.
Screaming for his own form of Trump-like national renewal, the disruptive leader of the UK’s top-polling political party – Reform – was in Washington to hobnob in the Oval Office and to tell Congress that Keir Starmer is turning Blighty into North Korea.
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Farage likens UK to North Korea in Congress
Mr Farage enjoys lapping up the limelight in Washington, where he is an old-world conservative celebrity in the new MAGA White House.
His calculation is that the MAGA wave will reach the UK shores soon.
Reform‘s policy platform is a mirror of the Trump agenda in many respects, tweaked accordingly. The administration is happy to support him. There is a MAGA-Reform mutual respect.
And so it is politically savvy or unavoidably necessary for Lord Mandelson, New Labour‘s architect laying the foundations of the current UK government, to proclaim: ‘We respect Trump too.’
The truth is the government, like so many around the world, sees Donald Trump as an infuriating and unpredictable disrupter with the ability to upend norms at the stroke of a Sharpie. But they can’t articulate that publicly.
Instead, the ‘Prince of Darkness’ will cast Mr Trump as the consequence not the cause of the disruption to international systems, even if many argue that he can be both.
As a master of spin, strategy and ruthlessness, Mandelson clearly has an admiration for Trump’s political style and sheer chutzpah.
Lord Mandelson’s speech comes a week before Mr Trump’s UK state visit. Pic: AP
He will tell the Ditchley Park lecture: “The president may not follow the traditional rulebook or conventional practice, but he is a risk taker in a world where a ‘business as usual’ approach no longer works.”
At a time when the Labour government is struggling and feeling the heat from Farage and his disrupters, are these words to be read as a not-so-subtle message to Prime Minister Starmer?
Mandelson is an old-fashioned liberal. He hasn’t the stomach for ‘wokey’ politics or own goals like the arrest of Graham Linehan. Is there a frustration that the political party he built is now messing it all up?
“Indeed, he seems to have an iron-clad stomach for political risk…” he will say of Trump, decrying the tendency of previous presidents to descend “into an analysis paralysis and gradual incrementalism”.
Lord Mandelson may be Britain’s man in Washington now but, more than anyone else to hold the post, he is deeply integrated into the Downing Street machine.
He is tight with Number 10 chief of staff Morgan McSweeney and was inside Downing Street when Friday’s reshuffle took place. A total coincidence I am told.
A week before the president’s state visit to the UK, Lord Mandelson’s speech is designed to steady a special relationship put under pressure by the return of Trump.
“Do we always have identical views?” he will say. “Of course not, we never have. And we are not looking for special treatment. Our alliance exists because it serves both nations’ interests, because the core values of Britons and Americans remain aligned, as the world around us becomes more threatening.”
Lord Mandelson will say Brexit has freed the UK to pursue closer ties with the US. Pic Reuters
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And, in a shapeshifting manoeuvre that only the original spin doctor could manage, Lord Mandelson, a cheerleading remainer in the EU referendum campaign, now casts Brexit as a liberator.
“Brexit has freed us to pursue closer US ties,” he will say in his speech.
“Britain has the opportunity to use its regulatory freedom and independence from European law to deepen American investment opportunities. This is crucial as, post-Brexit, we need to leverage every advantage we can to spur UK growth and employment.”
The ambassador is expected to concede that pre-referendum warnings of the demise of Britain’s trans-Atlantic clout have not transpired, while maintaining that Brexit has hit the UK financially with a net-loss to its economy.
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They say the British ambassador is the custodian of the US-UK special relationship. This ambassador has seen what the relationship looks like under Trump.
With trademark political gymnastics, he seems now to be both admiring of the Trumpian movement but also anxious that if Britain under Labour doesn’t get its house in order, then it too will get its own Trumpian disrupter.
Former US president Joe Biden has had surgery for skin cancer, his spokesperson has said.
It’s unclear when he had the procedure, but video from late August showed him leaving church in Delaware with a large, fresh scar on his head.
The spokesperson told Sky’s US partner, NBC News, that he was recovering well.
Mr Biden had Mohs surgery, which involves removing a layer of tissue, examining it under a microscope to see if any cancer cells remain, and repeating if necessary.
The 82-year had a basal cell carcinoma, one of the two most common skin cancer types, removed from his chest in 2023.
His doctor said at the time that all the cancerous cells had been removed.
The same year, Mr Biden’s wife, Jill, had two basal cell carcinomas removed from near her eye and on her chest.
The former president also revealed this May that he had stage-four prostate cancer – with the disease having spread to his bones and having a Gleason score of nine.
Such a score means the disease is “likely to grow quickly”, according to Cancer Research UK.
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His office said the prostate cancer was discovered when Mr Biden visited a doctor for urinary symptoms and that he was considering “multiple treatment options”.
“While this represents a more aggressive form of the disease, the cancer appears to be hormone-sensitive which allows for effective management,” said a statement.
Officers detained 475 people during an immigration raid on a Hyundai factory for electric vehicles in Georgia.
The majority of those detained at the 3,000-acre site west of Savannah are from South Korea, according to Steven Schrank, special agent in charge at Homeland Security Investigations.
Mr Schrank said the raid was the “largest single-site enforcement operation” in the history of the agency and followed an investigation of several months, which involved leads from community members and former workers.
The spokesman for the South Korean foreign ministry, Lee Jaewoong, said there was a “large” number of South Koreans among those detained in the raid, but did not provide an exact number.
A ‘large’ number of those detained were from South Korea
He said the detained workers were part of a “network of subcontractors” and that the employees worked for several different companies on the Georgia site.
Mr Lee said South Korea’s foreign ministry is dispatching diplomats from its embassy in Washington and consulate in Atlanta to the site, and plans to form an on-site response team centred on the local mission.
“The business activities of our investors and the rights of our nationals must not be unjustly infringed in the process of US law enforcement,” Mr Lee added.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that agents executed a search warrant “as part of an ongoing criminal investigation into allegations of unlawful employment practices and other serious federal crimes”.
The manufacturing site, which employs about 1,200 people, has been hailed as the largest economic development project in the state’s history by Governor Brian Kemp and other officials.
The Hyundai Motor Group plant in Georgia. File pic: AP Photo/Mike Stewart
Hyundai Motor Group, the biggest automaker in South Korea, started manufacturing electric vehicles at the $7.6bn (£7.4bn) site a year ago and partnered with LG Energy Solution to build an adjacent battery plant, which is set to open in 2026.
ICE spokesman Lindsay Williams confirmed the raid and said agents were focused on the construction site for the battery plant.
LG said in a statement that it was “closely monitoring the situation and gathered all relevant details”. The firm said it couldn’t immediately confirm how many of its employees or Hyundai workers had been detained.
“Our top priority is always ensuring the safety and well-being of our employees and partners. We will fully cooperate with the relevant authorities,” LG said.
Hyundai and LG’s battery joint venture, HL-GA Battery Company, said in a statement that it’s “cooperating fully with the appropriate authorities” and paused construction of the battery site to assist the investigation.
Operations at Hyundai’s electric vehicle manufacturing plant weren’t interrupted, plant spokesperson Biance Johnson said.
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