Compliance Unfiltered is TCT’s tell-it-like-it is podcast, dedicated to making compliance suck less. It’s a fresh, raw, uncut alternative for anyone who needs honest, reliable, compliance expertise with a sprinkling of personality.
Show Notes: Protecting Our Kids
Quick Take
In this crucial episode, of Compliance Unfiltered, the CU Guys cover some of the alarming tactics of online predators targeting children on platforms like Roblox and Discord.
Discover how these predators build trust, impersonate kids, and manipulate them into dangerous situations. Learn about the hidden dangers in popular gaming spaces, the impact of recent exposés, and practical steps for parents to protect their children.
This episode is essential listening for anyone concerned about children’s safety in the digital world. Arm yourself with the truth and join the fight to protect the next generation.
Read The Transcript
So let’s face it, managing compliance sucks. It’s complicated, it’s so hard to keep organized, and it requires a ton of expertise in order to survive the entire process.
Welcome to Compliance Unfiltered, a podcast dedicated to making compliance suck less. Now, here’s your host, Todd Coshow with Adam Goslin.
Well, welcome in to another edition of Compliance Unfiltered. I’m Todd Coshow alongside the sunshine on your compliance shoulders, Mr. Adam Goslin. How the heck are you, sir?
I am doing fantastic today, Todd. How about you?
Man, I cannot complain. I truly cannot.
Just a reminder, you know, for the folks out there, if you’re enjoying what you’re listening to, and you’d like to tell us about it, we’d love to hear from you. If you have some ideas about things that you’d like to hear, we’d love to hear from you. And if you just want to tell us that you like the sounds of our voices, and wish us a happy day, we’d like to hear from you as well. Give us a shout compliance unfiltered at total compliance tracking.com Well, Adam, today, we’re going to talk about something is as parents, it is near to dear to both of our hearts. And that is protecting our kids. Now, we both have a vested interest in protecting kids. Why don’t you tell the listeners how this topic raised its head to you recently?
Well, I was listening to the Sean Ryan show, and there was an episode from November where he had on an ethical hacker and cybersecurity expert, Ryan Montgomery, was on there and he was kind of going over and raising safety dangers, predator issues, and various threats especially within kind of the roadblocks platform. It was a fascinating, fascinating episode and honestly something that I wasn’t intimately familiar with, so it was fun learning.
And to that end, sharing information with others, spreading the word, all that fun stuff, I figured it’d be a good topic for us to go in and go in, hit, share the knowledge, and share the awareness.
Absolutely. Now, what exactly is roadblocks? I think that’s the best place to start for the listeners. They may be unfamiliar with it.
And I guess, what were some of the interesting outcomes of the unwanted exposure they got?
Well, Roblox is a popular online platform and creation system. It’s not just a single game, so it’s different than what a lot of people conceive as an online game. There’s a lot of them out there. We’ll be talking about them more as we go through this episode, but it’s not a single game.
Users can play millions of user-generated 3D experiences that range from role-playing and simulations to obstacle courses, and it’s kind of a social, user-generated, co-experienced platform where folks can create, share, and play games together. The downside is that effectively the bad guys, child predators, can interact with their victims through the communication capabilities within the game. As Ryan Montgomery brought up and brought forth a lot of the things that are going on on the platform as almost like a whistleblower style approach, he was reporting, reported finding predators and was providing assistance with getting them arrested for their activities on the platform. He claimed that Roblox had issued a cease and desist, and they banned his account instead of addressing the users that he exposed. Part of the problem with Roblox is that they have a financial incentive, because the way it works is that on the platform, as people are going in and playing games, some of them are free, some of them though are at a cost. For anywhere where there’s a cost for going in and playing different games on the platform, Roblox takes a cut. Roblox almost got a lot of financial incentive to allow activities that are making the money type of a deal. The interesting part of this particular exposure was that following the release of that Sean Ryan show episode, that Roblox ended up taking a significant temporary drop in their market value. There were some claims that they basically dropped approximately $6 billion in a short period of time following the release of the findings that Ryan Montgomery had exposed. It was pretty entertaining seeing the direct impact on the Roblox crew.
As I understand it, you’ve had some exposure to some of the bad elements of Roblox. Why don’t you share some of those experiences?
Yeah, absolutely. So I have, I have three children, not all of them small anymore, 15, nine and eight. But my oldest, when they were about eight years old, is really when Roblox kind of started to pick up Steam as a popular platform for folks to play on. And they really enjoyed playing games about things that looked fairly innocuous, things like games about wolf packs and things about, you know, titties and stuff like that. And you know, I’m over here looking at the game by going, Oh, that’s cool. You know, they’re having a good time. And then I start, they start talking about the role plays that they’re having when this within this game and about their different family members in their, their kitty coven or whatever it happens to be. And you start learning a little bit more about the language that the other players in these games are using and Adam, they’re not kids, it’s not kid language. And that kind of raised the hindsight for me. And I started paying a little bit more attention to what was going on. And it took me all of about five minutes of being in that gameplay to go, wait a second, this doesn’t feel right. I don’t want my child exposed to this.
So that was the first thing for me. And then from there, like with my two younger kids, I still don’t allow my children to play on the Roblox platform. And my two younger kids almost feel like social pariahs, because they’re the only ones of their friends, Adam, that aren’t playing on Roblox. And I looked at them in the face and I tell them why. See, it’s not a safe place for kids. It’s not a safe place for you to go and for me to feel comfortable with you being unsupervised. And so it’s just not going to be something that we play on. And then all this stuff comes out from Ryan Montgomery about these things and why they’re not safe. And I appreciate it.
Well, you know, and it’s difficult, right? Like, you know, I’m fairly certain that if the, you know, if the word was spread, if more people knew, you know, etc., that, you know, there’d be, we’ll call it far fewer that would be willingly allowing their, you know, their children onto that platform. So I think it’s just about, you know, about spreading the word.
But no, I mean, you know, kudos to you for first sticking with it and, you know, having it come full circle, you know what I mean?
Cheers. Well, you know, the other thing is that child predators are certainly not just secluded to roadblocks.
Right now, my question to you is what other platforms are known to have various nefarious activities going on?
Yeah, and I realize that we’re saying the word, roblox, but not spelling it. So for the listeners, it’s not roblox, but it is R-O-B-L-O-X is the way that you spell roblox.
So, you know, there’s a bunch of different platforms. There’s Discord, which is kind of like a voice chat platform that’s primarily used by gamers. You know, there’s Minecraft, it’s a multiplayer game. There’s Fortnite, which is a multiplayer game that allows voice and text communication with strangers. You’ve got your, you know, standard fair Instagrams and Snapchat as to social media platforms. You’ve also got one called Rec Room. It’s a virtual reality social platform where there’s, again, interaction with strangers. But any of these platforms that allow, you know, people to connect with one another, people to, you know, to be able to, you know, kind of seek out interaction, you know, interaction with folks makes it a, you know, makes it kind of a field day for the, you know, for the child predators out there, because now they’ve got, you know, now they’ve got a direct access to be able to access these, you know, these young folks, et cetera.
Well, what seems to be the playbook for the child predators in general on these platforms?
Well, I mean, certainly one of their main objectives is grooming, effectively building rapport with the kids that they’re interacting with. So maybe that includes offers of, hey, let me give you some free in-game currency. So on the Roblox platform, they’re called Robux, R-O-B-U-X, or some type of exclusive items from within the game. So they’re attempting to kind of build this rapport.
Meanwhile, in many cases, there’s impersonation attempts. So they’ll create fake accounts that look like they’re really other children. So the kids don’t feel that sense of danger because they believe that they’re talking to somebody else that’s also 10 years old or whatever it may be. So you’ve got impersonation happening. You’ve got the child predators seeking to have the kids kind of shift platforms. So they’ll be encouraging them to move from monitored public game chats to other unmonitored private apps. So they’ll shift them off of Roblox and try to head them over toward connecting on Snapchat or talking on Discord, et cetera. You’ve got efforts for effectively financial sextortion going on where the predators are coercing kids into sending explicit images and then turning around and demanding money out of the kids to not go ahead and expose what the predators now have been exposed to. But that particular crime, that scene, kind of a dramatic spike in reports of it happening. So there’s a lot of things in the playbook for these child predators. But at its root, they’re attempting to make this kind of social connection with the kids and then start to kind of start to take advantage of it, if you will.
Man, from a parent’s perspective, especially, but just in general, probably the scariest part of these groups on these platforms takes on kind of an extremely sinister objective, right? Tell the listeners more about that.
Yeah, there’s this, there’s this, honestly, as you and I are talking this through, man, I’m sitting here saying to myself, I am extremely glad that my kids are older and I didn’t necessarily need to need to deal with this dark underbelly. But no, there’s some seriously scary stuff going on on these platforms.
There’s a group called 764. It’s a kind of a hybrid, satanic cult, domestic terrorist organization that literally deliberately prays on children. This group, this group supposedly their membership is somewhere around 20 to 30,000 people where they’re targeting minors between nine and 17 years old. These members obviously are using these platforms to target them. But some of the stuff that was coming out on that Sean Ryan episode, I would strongly encourage listeners if you haven’t, if this is a topic that either for you or something that you know would be of interest, there’s a segment of that particular episode, it’s episode 255 for their pod. But there’s a section of that episode where they were specifically talking about some of the child predator activities. And it is an unbelievable listen. They were talking about how the members of this group literally will go to online sites that are kind of mental health forums where ostensibly a safe place for kids to be able to get some assistance with things that they’re struggling with. Meanwhile, the predators are using the same forum that the kids are trying to get help from in order to identify vulnerable kids and try to get to be friends or romantic partners with them so that they can start grooming them. The 764 group has some like 240 plus page manual that they share with their members on ways, methods, approaches, et cetera, for how to extort victims into both self-harm and suicide. On the show, as they were going through it, they were literally were pulling up some content where these sickos effectively had kind of driven this one kid down, down, down to the point where he was doing self-harm on video to himself and ended up basically committing just an atrocious form of suicide. And these sickos, they’re literally doing this for kicks and giggles, for fun, whatever. I mean, there are some massively sick people out there, massively.
Well, what were some of the insights you were able to glean about the folks that are doing these thick grooming activities?
Well, you know, one of the, one of the scariest parts about it is that, you know, you’ve got, yes, you have this contingent that are, you know, seeking and acquiring, you know, children to, to groom. But, you know, in this kind of group of, you know, group of predators, so you’ve got, you know, some, some of the folks that have been very successful at grooming kids and they’ll start basically building almost like a dossier of, of children that they basically have on the hook, you know, type of a deal. And there’s a black market out there where the, where these folks that are building these lists of, of kind of groomed kids will then turn around and sell the list that they’ve now built. They’ll turn and sell that list and monetize it to other child predators so that, you know, they can just go and, you know, kind of pick up, assume so-and-so’s identity and, you know, do whatever they’re going to go, you know, go, go do with this, with this list of kind of already, you know, already primed kids that they’ve, they’ve already put through the grooming process.
So there is just, I mean, for anybody that has, you know, whether you have a, you know, have kids of your own, whether you know somebody that’s got kids, I mean, I can’t express strongly enough, you know, the awareness that needs to be shared about what’s, you know, some of the things that are going on. It’s not to say that all interaction on these platforms is bad, right? There certainly are things that, you know, that can and do happen on them that isn’t, but, you know, just walking in eyes wide open, I would strongly encourage sharing the word, you know, sharing the knowledge, etc., with folks around you that you care about because, you know, awareness is the key.
Yeah, it is. But what about the action piece? What are some suggestions for what to do about it?
Well, I mean, you know, most certainly, you know, setting up and heavily customizing, you know, parental controls on all of the devices and games and whatnot that, you know, that, that, that your kids are, are, are kind of playing on. Um, you know, I think the, I think the scope of what those tools would be will really kind of depend on, depend on the kid and what they’re doing, et cetera. I mean, you know, locking down their, locking down their devices so that they, uh, so that they need permission in order to, uh, you know, kind of install additional things onto the, onto the system. There’s a, I know there’s a, there’s a fairly strong push, you know, kind of by the kids, right? The kids are going to push for, Hey, I don’t want, you know, I, I’m, I’m bucking this, uh, you know, kind of oversight and I want to be able to just, you know, install fill in the bank on my, on my device, you know, don’t share the credentials for, you know, uh, basically the, the protections that you have in, uh, in and on there for your kids. Um, you know, the whole point is to keep that stuff to yourself.
That way you can monitor what’s happening as you’re installing new apps or installing new, uh, you know, new things onto the, onto the device. Um, you know, then you now have some visibility to what exactly is going on. Um, you know, it’s not, not just, you know, kind of on their, you know, their phones and computers and the apps that they have there, but it’s also about kind of controlling the, the, the web browser. Um, you know, what sites can they go to? What sites can’t they, you know, can’t, you can’t, they get to, are you going to take an approach of, well, you know, kind of white listing the sites that, you know, that they are allowed to, you know, to, to go ahead and hit things along those lines. Those are decisions that, you know, that kind of parents need to make in conjunction with the controls that they’ve managed to, you know, kind of get onto the, uh, you know, get, get onto the device, um, additionally, uh, you know, disabling, um, you know, disabling any direct chat capability, uh, uh, disabling voice chat with strangers, uh, you know, where, where, where you can do that, you know, go, go ahead and take a look at your, at your capabilities there. Uh, I mean, certainly regularly monitoring, you know, who’s your child interacting with and in these kind of online virtual playgrounds, uh, you know, type of a thing and, and probably, you know, one of the, you know, one of the elements, uh, when you do, um, because you will come across suspicious activity, you know, at Satara. So, um, you know, reporting any of that suspicious activity, you know, immediately over to the, uh, to the platform and, uh, to the national center for missing and exploited children. It’s, it’s kind of short form as the, uh, NC MEC, uh, but yeah, I would, I’d go and report, report to both, um, that way at bare minimum, the platforms of, uh, is, is, doesn’t have an excuse for why they, gee, I didn’t know,
uh, you know, type of a deal, um, and, uh, you know, sharing that information with the national center for missing, exploited children, you know, we’ll help them with, you know, with governance over, you know, over the activities that are happening on these platforms. You know, one of the biggest problems is, you know, you’ve got, you know, the, the, kind of the overseers, if you will, but, uh, but you’ve got, you know, websites and games and, you know, and whatnot spinning up, um, you know, left, right. And sideways. So it’s, uh, I can imagine it would be astoundingly challenging for, you know, for the, uh, those that are in charge of the protection to really be able to be on top of everything.
So, uh, the more voices we’ve got in the mix that are reporting suspicious activity and whatnot will only, uh, you’ll help and assist with the, you know, overall governance, the capabilities that, that we’ve got as a society. Absolutely.
Parting shots and thoughts for the folks this week, Adam.
Well, like I said, a couple of different times as we went through this, the biggest key here is awareness. We’ve got to make sure that people are cognizant of what’s going on.
These are real, this isn’t something that’s only happening to scant few handful of folks out there. You know, the reality is that this is happening all the time on a myriad of platforms. And, you know, really for the listeners, you know, being cognizant of what’s going on, sharing information with, you know, with folks that, you know, that do have, you know, even if you don’t have kids, you know, that are in that age range, but, you know, sharing it with your other family members, your friends, things on those lines. I guarantee you, there are a lot of people out there that just, they don’t have any idea. You know, some of these groups are, you know, kind of pressing kids into, you know, various forms of self-harm, you know, through their activities, including, you know, carving, you know, carving words into their, you know, onto their skin, into, you know, in some cases, you know, coercing people into carving words on their foreheads. You know, there’s just all sorts of really disgusting, sick things that are happening out there. And, you know, I just, I really want folks to be cognizant of what all’s going on out there, spread the word, let’s, you know, kind of all do our part to help to protect these kids. you
And now right there, that’s the good stuff. Well, that’s all the time we have for this episode of Compliance Unfiltered. I’m Todd Coshow and I’m Adam Goslin. Hope we helped to get you fired up to make your compliance suck less.
