A man has been convicted of grooming on the Roblox video game platform in Mendoza province, after admitting during a shortened trial that he had harassed a minor, aged 13. The individual was already accused in 2021 for distributing photos of children. Judge Marco Martinelli, of the Collegiate Criminal Court No. 1 in Tunuyán, ratified the agreement between Benjamin Elías Marín Mendoza and the prosecutor for Crimes against Sexual Integrity, Flavio D'amore, sentencing the accused to three years in prison for harassing a teenager on Roblox. According to the report by the MDZ media outlet, accessed by the Argentine News Agency, Marín Mendoza was sentenced for the crime of distributing images of sexual exploitation or child sexual abuse. As in other cases, the accused connected to the virtual platform to communicate with minors and there began to establish a 'friendship' with the girl. This information was provided by the American NGO National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC). Alert with Roblox Currently, Roblox has more than 350 million users worldwide, and according to the latest statistics, 40% of users are under the age of 12. Faced with this scenario, many abusers take advantage of the vulnerability of children and adolescents to pose as peers, strike up conversations, and then demand intimate content. In the City of Buenos Aires and other provinces, Roblox has been blocked in schools so that students cannot access the system within the classrooms. After gaining access to the victim's WhatsApp, Marín Mendoza demanded intimate photos from her. Over a prolonged period, the accused received content from the minor until her mother accessed the conversations, which allowed it to be confirmed that it was a case of grooming, leading to the corresponding complaint. An agreement was reached in recent hours after the accused confessed that he contacted the minor through the platform and, after deceiving her, managed to obtain her cell phone number and through that channel asked for the photos. This is the first conviction of this kind known in Mendoza, a province that joins others that have already sentenced various accused individuals for grooming on video game platforms. A fact that emerged in the case is that Marín Mendoza was already accused in 2021 of distributing photos of minors through a platform dependent on Google.
