Pembroke Pines man used online platform to get kids to expose themselves, cops say
A Pembroke Pines man is behind bars after soliciting sexual videos of a young girl via a popular gaming platform, according to court records.
Authorities were first notified of 19-year-old Manuel Eduardo Rodriguez’s, alleged crimes in November, when the South Florida Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force received a “cybertip” from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), his arrest report shows.
Pembroke Pines Police Department Special Victims Unit detectives were tapped in on Jan. 12 and conducted a months-long investigation that led to Rodriguez’s March 25 arrest.
Per his arrest report, Rodriguez and the 8-year-old girl chatted through Roblox, an online platform famous for hosting millions of user-created games and chat rooms.
Roblox officials flagged a conversation between the two — where Rodriguez was allegedly “enticing children to video chat while exposing the child’s genitals in exchange for Robux,” or in-game currency — to the NCMEC on Nov. 5, launching the probe.
Roblox began requiring age verification to access chat features in January, following years-long criticism of the platform’s poor moderation and lax restrictions that have enabled child predators.
When taken in for questioning, Rodriguez told detectives that he’d previously traded Robux for explicit photos or videos from minors and was aware of the girl’s age when requesting “sexually explicit videos of her touching herself,” the arrest report says.
Rodriguez — who lives in west Pines but was born in New York City — was released on a $10,000 bond the day after his arrest and has been placed on house arrest, records show.
He faces a felony charge of obscene use of a computer to seduce, solicit or lure a child, officials said.
