I’m seeking help from the dev community to ban a group of cybercriminals who have stolen 32 Roblox groups to date, money of hundreds of kids through dev products, subs, gamepass etc that don’t work and violates copyright of trademarks as Adidas.
Evidence: I have been taking screenshots of the connections between all of the cybercriminals and their crimes.
What happened: they use social engineering to fool desperate people, I’ll link 3 posts about victims, but there are 32 victims in total, probably more, then after they get the groups, they “sell” them to their partner Fortunato Industries to clean their historial and avoid losing all the stole material in account terminations.
The problem is well know in Roblox now (internally anyway), but the scammers are running around it legally. The problem with getting Roblox to reverse any of this is that is happens outside of Roblox for the most part. I am glad that the topic is kept alive here for the public to see so others might not fall for the scam, but just too many devs don’t visit this forum unless they need help, which could be weeks to months between visits.
I think the community would be served best if Roblox did make some kind of official announcement to spread awareness of the scam, but trying to get Roblox to start doing reversals everywhere might not happen, at least not fast as one would want if you were the victims for example.
Another issue is, say you did get a hold of someone really high up in the Roblox corporate ladder that really focused on helping, a lot of the internal bureaucracy would get in the way. Especially if the scammers really play on the “they aren’t the victim, we are because they are trying to steal it back from us”.
Think of it like this, if you were brought a case where you have to weight both sides, one claims the game was stolen, the other claims they are trying to steal it back and the only thing you can work with is what information Roblox can provide you (chat logs, user account information, robux transactions logs, etc.) and anything else 3rd party is suspect, you are going to side with the current game owner by default.
These guys have been doing this for months, it sucks Roblox’s moderation hasn’t stepped in and done anything yet, I know their support email has received emails from several of the victims and it’s terrible that there hasn’t been any response. The amount of groups this person has been able to scam under the same account without any moderation against him is unacceptable. Things like this in the Roblox ecosystem are bad for small developers who are unaware of the best practices when doing transactions of selling games like this.
It doesn’t help that Roblox’s stance on selling games is very unclear, there’s not many official up-to-date sources on how to handle these kinds of transactions. Many small developers are aware of larger companies like Gamefam and IndiGo who give the impression that they participate in these kinds of practices, so small developers are not always put off by attempts like these. It doesn’t help that the scammer is using a high-value account which is unexpected from someone who’s intent is to scam people. This person also own’s a large trading group with a lot of high value accounts and recognizable developers under it Trade - Roblox
Roblox terms of service makes it difficult to do anything in these situations. A lot of the victims have tried pursuing the DMCA route to try to take down their stolen game but Roblox’s terms of service has it so that transferring group ownership allows rights to the new group owner to use content under the group. This makes sense as a thing to be in the terms of service, but it sucks in situations like these as victims of this scam aren’t given any decent options to deal with things like this. The only option left is to try to pursue legal stuff to get it back, but the price of going this route is difficult to consider viable and it doesn’t help that many of the victims are under 18.
