The Roblox Corporation has filed a lawsuit against Roblox content creator Benjamin Robert Simon a.k.a. Ruben Sim for leading a "cybermob" that, among other things, posts "false and misleading terrorist threats."
As reported by Polygon, this lawsuit was filed on Tuesday, November 23 and alleges that Simon "commits and encourages unlawful acts designed to injure Roblox and its users." The Roblox Company is looking to collect $1.6 million in damages and is suing Simon for fraud, breach of contract and four other counts.
Despite Simon being banned for years from Roblox, he has found a way in by "hacking" and using accounts created by other users. He was originally banned for "harassing users and using racist and homophobic slurs, as well as for sexual harassment and uploading photos of Adolf Hitler, Roblox's lawyers said."
Recently, Simon posted "terrorist threats" that "temporarily shut down the Roblox Developers Conference in San Francisco in October." The lawsuit alleges that Simon and his "cybermob" discussed the YouTube headquarters shooting from April 2018 and reportedly said, "wait until [someone] does it to Roblox."
He continued to reportedly post messages suggesting that San Francisco police were "searching for notorious Islamic Extremist" at RDC 2021 and wrote messages like "don't come to RDC tomorrow." As a result of these threats, RDC was "forced into a temporary lockdown while local police and private security conducted a search to secure the facility." Roblox said it cost $50,000 to "investigate and secure RDC after the incident."
This is hardly the first issue Roblox – a company that is now worth more than Ubisoft and Take-Two combined – has had to deal with, as it recently had to stop a number of users who were recreating New Zealand's Christchurch mass shooting from 2019.
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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.