A man has been sentenced to 28 months in prison after grooming a 14-year-old girl on the gaming platform Roblox.
Carlo Tritta, from Eastleigh, Hampshire, had pleaded guilty to offences including making indecent images of a child, engaging in sexual communications with a child, and intimidating a witness.
He was 18 when he began messaging his victim on the gaming app, building her trust online until she felt they were in a relationship. After moving to other platforms, he then encouraged her to send explicit sexual images. Soon, the grooming moved offline and Tritta started sending the girl - whose identity is protected by law - gifts and takeaways at her family home.
After a year of grooming, the victim's mother became concerned and reported Tritta to the police. "I can't even explain how I felt, what I'd seen on my girl's phone," the victim's mother told Sky News. "I can't even explain it, it's like... I have medication to calm me down, I'm in therapy. It's like a continuing nightmare," she said.
After his arrest, when he was ordered not to contact the girl, he continued to do so. Tritta, now 19, sent his victim greeting cards containing his new phone number, because his old phone was being held by the police, and contacted her friends. In one card, he warned her if the case against him ended up in court, "both our names" would be "ran through dirt for the world to see".
He also warned her the officer leading the case was male and "would see anything", and claimed he had tried to stop that. Tritta travelled from his Hampshire home to her home in Manchester several times and maliciously called social services about the girl's mother, as well as telling the teenager he had called the police on her mother and brother "for your protection".
In December, he was arrested for perverting the course of justice after he tried to get his victim to drop the charges. But, three days after he was given a suspended sentence, Tritta returned to her family home. He was rearrested and was charged with a series of child sex offences. In court the next day, Tritta pleaded guilty to three counts of making indecent images of a child, engaging in sexual communications with a child, causing a child aged 13-15 to watch/look at a sexual image, two counts of intimidating a witness, and criminal damage.
"Once the police came, and they sat talking to my daughter, and they asked, 'Where did you meet him?' [She said] 'Roblox'. I was like... 'Roblox? The kids game you go on? What?'" said the victim's mother. She blames Roblox for what happened to her daughter, because she said the company "should do more" to protect children.
"[It's] a child's game where predators are going on. And they might not even be necessarily there to groom children but they can talk to them freely and do what they want," she said. "It's like a nice playing field for them with children, isn't it?"
A Roblox spokesperson said: "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."
