Paedophile, 36, groomed 13-year-old British girl on children’s gaming site Roblox then flew to UK to have sex with her

A man traveled to Britain from Germany with the intention of having sex with a 13-year-old girl he met through Roblox.

Michael Shablinger, 36, cared for the 13-year-old victim – who cannot be identified for legal reasons – for months after finding her on the video game platform.

Norwich Crown Court heard Shablinger, who told the victim he was 21, met her in a park in Hethersett, Norfolk. He spent five hours with her until she was tracked down by her mother.

Oliver Haswell, prosecuting, said the victim has refused to say what happened between them during the hours she was missing from the park.

But a photo of the couple kissing was later found on a “secret” phone Shablinger had given her.

Mr Haswell said the meeting in the park followed months of ‘grooming’, which had started on the online gaming platform Roblox when she was just 12.

Last year, child safety campaigners urged Ofcom to act after a report branded Roblox an ‘X-rated pedophile hell’.

The popular game in which young players create or play virtual universes has been accused of exposing children to “grooming, pornography and violent content.”

After meeting on the train platform in May 2023, Shablinger arranged to meet the victim, who told her mother that she was “going for a walk with the dog” with a friend on June 16, 2024 at 11 a.m.

But when she didn’t return, the mother went out to search for the missing girl herself, and found her in a park with Shablinger.

The defendant, who said he had “only just met her,” then left the area on a bus.

The victim then lied to her mother about what happened, prompting the concerned parent to contact police.

Once home, the victim claimed she was not feeling well and went to her room.

But the mother later found her daughter “hiding something in her bed,” which turned out to be a “secret” cell phone that Shablinger had given her when they met.

There were messages with requests from him for “further meetings,” a photo of them kissing and telling her to “hide the phone” from her mother.

Police discovered the phone also contained conversations about the defendant seeking a passport for the victim so she could “leave the country to be with him.”

Shablinger was arrested by Border Police officers at Heathrow Airport on June 23 as he attempted to board a flight to Munich.

Police seized his phone and found indecent images and videos of unidentified children, as well as indecent images of the victim.

The prosecutor said “many” sexualized images and messages were exchanged between the two.

Mr Haswell said Shablinger encouraged and ‘instructed’ the victim to perform sex acts and filmed her doing so.

He said the victim refused to tell police what happened when she and Shablinger met and that she even sent him a message saying “I’m lucky, I lied to the police.”

Shablinger, born in Austria but living in Germany, appeared in court on Wednesday after admitting to meeting a child following sexual grooming.

He also admitted sexual activity with a child and six offenses of possessing more than 800 indecent images of children.

Three of those crimes involved photographs and videos of the victim – including five Category A, the most serious – and another three involved unidentified children, including 346 Category A.

Recorder Paul Garlicked imposed an extended sentence of eight and a half years, consisting of four and a half years’ imprisonment and four years’ probation.

Ed Renvoize, mitigating, said the defendant accepted that ‘this is an extremely serious matter’ but he deserved credit for pleading guilty to the offences.

He said Shablinger was “untruthful about his age” but insisted there was “no kidnapping or detention involved” in this case.

Shablinger was also made the subject of a Sexual Harm Prevention Order (SHPO) and placed on the sex offenders register indefinitely.

He was also prohibited from directly or indirectly contacting or attempting to contact the victim until further notice.

Roblox has no age restrictions as campaigners say the UK communications watchdog Ofcom needs to make a ‘step change’ in implementing and then enforcing the Online Safety Act (OSA).

The American investment company Hindenburg Research released devastating findings after a lengthy investigation into the controversial platform.

The new law will impose new tasks on social media sites for the first time. The largest and most popular, but also those that count children among their users, will face the strictest rules.

Platforms must implement and enforce security measures to ensure that users, especially young people, are not exposed to illegal or harmful content. If they do, it will be quickly removed, with those who break the rules facing hefty fines.

One of the campaign groups urging Ofcom to take action is the Molly Rose Foundation – set up by the parents of 14-year-old Molly Russell from Harrow, North West London, who took her own life in 2017 after seeing harmful content online.

Roblox rejected Hindenburg’s allegations, insisting that security was “fundamental” to the company. And Hindenburg has also stated that it is trying to take advantage of a decline in Roblox’s value by taking a “short” position on the company’s stock price.

The online gaming platform has become successful with young children, offering a range of different games and interactive tools, as well as the ability to create your own challenges.

But Hindenburg’s research raised concerns about inappropriate links being within a child’s reach when he visits the site.

The report states: ‘The core of the problem is that Roblox’s social media features allow pedophiles to efficiently target hundreds of children, without prior screening to prevent them from joining the platform.’

It also says there are “digital strip clubs, red-light districts, sex parties and child predators lurking on Roblox,” which has 80 million daily users.

And Roblox was accused of being “an X-rated pedophile hell, exposing children to grooming, pornography, violent content and extremely offensive language.”

Hindenburg also said it had found multiple accounts with names that were variations on the name of disgraced pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein.

A Roblox spokesperson said in a statement in response to the Hindenburg investigation: “Security and civility have been fundamental to Roblox since our founding nearly two decades ago, and we have invested heavily in our efforts in this area throughout our history of trust and security.

“Every day, tens of millions of users of all ages have safe and positive experiences with Roblox and adhere to the company’s community standards. However, every security incident is terrible.

“We take any content or behavior on the platform that does not meet our standards very seriously and we have developed a robust set of proactive and preventative security measures to detect and prevent malicious or harmful activity on our platform.”

Hindenburg Research teams investigating Roblox attempted to create accounts using the names of notorious child molesters and criminals.

They tried to set one up under the name Earl Brian Bradley – a pedophile convicted of molesting 103 children – but discovered the username was already taken, along with a host of variants, including earlbrianbradley69.

There were 900 variations of the name ‘Jeffrey Epstein’, plus 600 hits when searching for ‘Diddy’ games.

Some of these games were called ‘Diddy Party’, ‘Run from Diddy Simulator’ and individually ‘Escape to Epstein Island’.

Young people on ‘child accounts’ – that is, under the age of 13 – could also search for ‘adults’ to find inappropriate content.

Roblox self-reported more than 13,000 incidents of child exploitation to the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 2023.