• Slug: Howard Center-Online Exploitation. 2,175 words.
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By Gianna Montiel
Howard Center for Investigative Journalism

PHOENIX – An adult sexual predator, posing as a teenager, sought out young boys from 10 to 13 years old to entice them to play various online gaming platforms and then sexually exploited them, police in Scottsdale say – part of a growing trend that authorities contend should put parents on alert.

“A lot of cases that we’re coming across, especially with younger victims, are starting from online gaming,” said the case detective, who asked not to be named because of his undercover work in the Scottsdale Police Department’s Human Exploitation Unit.

In this case, Jacob Lozano, 23 and living in Florida, met the boys through online games and lured them onto an instant messaging app, according to police records and interviews. Once there, “he was enticing and coercing these boys … into performing various acts on camera, unbeknownst to them,” the Scottsdale detective said, and “they were being surreptitiously recorded.”

Lozano then doled out rewards such as PlayStation gift cards and, in at least one case, “he actually ordered pizza to their house,” the detective added.

The activity came to light when the mother of an 11-year-old boy with special needs from Scottsdale found sexually explicit messages on her son’s cell phone between him and Lozano, and she got in touch with police and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), according to police records.

Scottsdale detectives investigated and identified Lozano as the suspect. According to the case detective, police soon discovered about a dozen other Arizona boys who they said were also sexually exploited by Lozano, as well as alleged victims in other states, although as of the end of July, charges outside of Arizona had yet to be filed.

What happened to the children Lozano met online is not uncommon. A 2022 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that in the last several years, increases in online access, new technology, and the rise of encryption are contributing to growing online sexual exploitation of children. “The scale of sexual exploitation and abuse of children online is increasing and the sustained growth is outstripping the U.S. government’s capacity and global capacity to respond,” the report said.

Recent NCMEC data shows that reports of online sexual enticement to its CyberTipLine, including financial sextortion of underage people, jumped more than 300% between 2021 and 2023.

This wasn’t the first time Lozano was connected to a NCMEC CyberTip about online crimes against children. According to records from the DeSoto County, Florida Sheriff’s Office, images of a prepubescent boy were found in a social media account controlled by Lozano. “Attempts to contact Jacob as part of that investigation were unsuccessful,” the incident report stated, and that case was designated inactive.

But after this latest CyberTip and investigation, in January, Lozano was arrested in Florida and extradited to Arizona. Maricopa County court records show he was charged with 14 counts of sexual exploitation of a minor, and three counts each of aggravated luring of a minor for sexual exploitation and unlawfully misrepresenting his age. Lozano is being held in Lower Buckeye Jail in Phoenix and is awaiting trial.

Backpage is shuttered and online threats evolve

The use of online platforms to facilitate sexual exploitation and human trafficking is not new, but the move towards using gaming to lure victims began to gain popularity after a federal crackdown on a different part of the internet six years ago. The crackdown focused on websites that facilitate the buying and selling of commercial sex.

In April 2018, the FBI took down Backpage.com, which it said was the biggest online platform for advertising sex for pay and included ads depicting the prostitution of children. The company was founded in Arizona and made half a billion dollars from facilitating prostitution and sex trafficking online, according to a U.S. Department of Justice press release announcing plea deals submitted in response to a 93-count federal indictment.

“For far too long, Backpage.com existed as the dominant marketplace for illicit commercial sex, a place where sex traffickers frequently advertised children and adults alike,” then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in the release.

A few days after Backpage.com’s shuttering, federal legislation known as FOSTA-SESTA, which stands for the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) and Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), was enacted. The new law made it a crime for those who control online platforms to knowingly use their websites to promote or facilitate sex trafficking.

The crackdown led to the creation of new venues for the online sex marketplace that have vexed law enforcement agencies ever since. Many platforms relocated overseas. The use of digital payments for sex and increases in the use of social media, dating, hookup, and messaging/communication platforms contributed to the fragmentation of the online sex industry, making it more difficult for law enforcement to track these crimes, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office report.

“What we’re seeing now is a rapid evolvement of different kinds of social media that young people use, which can be hard to monitor while so many new risks and vulnerabilities to human trafficking exist and continue to evolve in the online domain,” Ieke de Vries, assistant professor of criminology at Leiden University in the Netherlands, said in an email.

De Vries said that she was concerned that this trend was “sexual exploitation at (a) larger scale and in a way that is hard to investigate.”

Records obtained by the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at Arizona State University from police agencies across Arizona revealed that from 2020 to 2022, cases of sex trafficking and sexual enticement in Arizona could be traced to online platforms based overseas and to social media applications.

For example, the escort site Megapersonals played a role in a 2021 sex trafficking incident in Marana, a town 20 miles northwest of Tucson. The Megapersonals website is owned and operated by Sfanti Grup Solutions SRL, a company based in Bucharest, Romania.

According to the 2021 GAO report, the relocation of websites abroad makes it harder for U.S. law enforcement to gather evidence because those who control these companies don’t always answer legal assistance requests for information from criminal investigators. If they do respond, they can sometimes take months, if not years, according to officials from the U.S. Department of Justice.

The GAO report did not specifically name any companies or websites that have dodged or delayed requests for information from U.S. law enforcement.

In the case in Marana, police responded to a Red Roof Inn on the I-10 corridor, where police records said officers found a woman being sex trafficked by Lafayette Thomas. The investigation found that Thomas created an account on Megapersonals to solicit sex buyers.

Thomas was booked and charged for sex trafficking. He later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three years and 120 days for sex trafficking, according to the Marana Police Department.

Public records from other jurisdictions in Arizona also show social media apps being used to solicit sex buyers. In July 2020, police responded to a call from the Three Palms Resort Hotel in the Tucson suburb of Oro Valley. The victim was a 17-year-old girl with bruises on her legs and burn marks, which she told police were from her ex-pimp, according to an Oro Valley police report.

Four years earlier, when the same girl was 13, a Tucson police detective found advertisements for buyers to have sex with her on Backpage.com, the online platform used for commercial sex advertising that was shut down by the FBI in 2018.

“It is clear that after Backpage’s closure, many other websites were used and the problem exists,” de Vries said.

Roblox, one of the latest battlefields in fighting online sexual exploitation

Gaming platforms have become a recurrent setting for online child sexual exploitation, according to Sgt. Lorence Jove Jr. of the Tucson Police Department.

“Traffickers are extremely opportunistic,” Jove said. “So if I’m a trafficker and I know, hey, this gaming platform, there’s tons of kids between the age of 12 and 17 and they’re all on this video game. They’re all unmonitored. Their parents don’t know what they’re doing, who they’re talking to. All the trafficker needs is an opportunity for connection.”

One of those platforms the Tucson Police Department has on its radar, according to Jove, is Roblox, a popular gaming site that allows children to interact with other players and play in worlds that they can create themselves. Roblox has surged in popularity to become one of the leading gaming sites for children in the world – the company said nearly 60% of users in 2023 were 16 years old and under.

The National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) – a nonpartisan and nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C. that raises awareness about sexual abuse and exploitation – included Roblox on its “Dirty Dozen List,” a list of 12 online platforms that “facilitate, enable, and even profit from sexual abuse and exploitation,” according to NCOSE.

A Roblox spokesperson told the Howard Center that it has implemented various safety measures to ensure a safer environment for younger players, including content moderation, chat filters and parental controls, but it continues to draw scrutiny from those who track child exploitation crimes. The company didn’t comment on it being named on the Dirty Dozen List.

A June 2023 NCOSE report titled “Roblox Isn’t All Fun and Games” found many children visited virtual “condo experiences,” where other users encouraged children to enter someone’s virtual house, go into the virtual bedroom, and engage in virtual sex acts.

The NCOSE report also cited several criminal sexual offenses against children across the country that involved the Roblox gaming app, which the Howard Center verified through court records. For example, a 14-year-old Ohio girl was sexually assaulted by an adult she met on Roblox who was posing as a fellow teen on the platform, according to a federal complaint filed in December 2022 in the Eastern District of Michigan. Danil Baker, 21, of Saline, Michigan, picked the girl up from school and engaged in multiple sexual acts with her, before dropping her off at a homeless shelter, court documents show.

Baker pleaded guilty to two counts of interstate transportation of a minor to engage in criminal sexual activity and was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison.

In another 2022 incident, records from the Highland County, Florida Sheriff’s Office show that deputies recovered a girl under 12 who was kidnapped and sexually assaulted by a man she met on Roblox. According to the charging affidavit, 19-year-old Anthony Borgesano of Sebring, Florida faced 11 charges, ranging from sexual assault of a minor to kidnapping. In April, he pleaded guilty to using a computer to seduce a child, two counts of traveling to meet a minor and lewd molestation, while the prosecutor dropped the other charges. Borgesano is in jail awaiting sentencing.

Roblox Corporation, based in San Mateo, California, has faced numerous lawsuits related to the safety of children on its platform, including a class action lawsuit filed in San Mateo County Superior Court in December that said Roblox is rife with “rampant sexual content, including the presence of child predators posing as innocuous avatars in an effort to groom child-users,” according to the amended complaint. The lawsuit was voluntarily dismissed the following month for a technical reason related to arbitration, according to an attorney for the plaintiff, who said he couldn’t elaborate.

When asked about the class action lawsuit, Roblox didn’t directly respond but instead directed the Howard Center to a blog post and issued a statement discussing its commitment to providing a safe environment for its users. The statement referred to Roblox’s team of content moderators and safety tools to filter inappropriate content and block chats with other users.

“We have an expert team of thousands of people dedicated to moderation and safety on Roblox 24/7, and we act swiftly to block inappropriate content or behavior when detected, including sexual content,” the emailed statement said.

The class action lawsuit against Roblox wasn’t about what the company was allowing on their platform, the lawyer said, but that the company knew that they couldn’t filter everything out and still said it was a safe platform for children to use.

Roblox recently partnered with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Know2Protect Initiative, a first-of-its-kind, national public awareness campaign launched in April to combat online child sexual exploitation and abuse.

In a DHS press release, Roblox pledged to display billboard advertisements in its game that will provide tips on Internet safety and best practices for gamers. The company also said that it plans to create immersive experiences in collaboration with Know2Protect, such as new characters from the campaign’s iGuardian training program and Know2Protect badges for Roblox users.

For the Scottsdale detective, the challenge remains immense. “I think we’re definitely behind the eight-ball trying to keep up, just from a resources standpoint. And then on top of that, it’s a matter of geographical boundaries and jurisdictional boundaries,” the Scottsdale detective said.

“At the end of the day, you know, we can only go so far and only do so much.”

The Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication is an initiative of the Scripps Howard Foundation in honor of the late news industry executive and pioneer Roy W. Howard.

For more stories from Cronkite News, visit cronkitenews.azpbs.org.