On Roblox, Deceptive advertising is the use of false, misleading, or unproven information to advertise places to users or advertising as a bait-and-switch mechanism. One form of deceptive advertising is to put a thumbnail of an experience while the experience is different. Most developers of misleading advertisements have malicious intents, such as trying to get ratings or become famous online.
False Advertising Methods[]
Different tactics have been used to lure users to places that have no connection to the content advertised.
False Thumbnail[]
Thumbnails are made for users to preview the creator's place and/or present experience-art, as well as its logos and video previews via YouTube. However, some places have images that might be misleading and possibly may not represent the experience. Deceptive advertisers very often use famous YouTubers like DrTrayBlox and Denis which helps accelerate the popularity of the experience. These experiences will typically have low ratings and are usually deleted by Roblox after a few days.
Misleading Title[]
The experience's title represents what the place is about. Deceptive builders often utilize the title space to attract users into their experience, such as having a title of "Fall 9,999,999 Feet to your Death" when the experience is an obstacle course. Many builders advertise their experience through reverse psychology, oftentimes writing "don't visit this experience" as a way to lure users into visiting it.
Experience-teleporters[]
With the release of inter-experience teleporters, builders can utilize alternate accounts to attract users into multiple experiences, with those experiences ultimately teleporting the users into the creator's main experience. These experiences typically use a server size of one. They use deceptive advertising techniques such as misleading place images and titles and were often on the Top Rated section of the discover page. Inter-experience teleporters occasionally can crash a user's Roblox client, sometimes when you are recording using Roblox. This happens in some scam experiences.
Bots[]
Bots are set up by a developer of a place to automatically thumbs-up said place, with the goal being to hit the Top Rated section of the Discover page. Often, places that use bots are experience-teleporters. An easy way to find them is to look at the visits compared to likes + dislikes. If the number of visits is not much higher than the number of likes, then the developer of it has likely used a like-bot. However, in April 2015, the web team adjusted the algorithm for calculating the Top Rated section, which caused this method to not get onto the Top Rated section, as well as some of the bot accounts that had their places botted permanently deleted. You now must visit an experience to rate it.
From late 2017 to mid-2019, botting into the popular section, using many thousands of bot accounts, was common. However, since 2019, the problem of botting has been significantly reduced.
Deceptive advertisements[]
At the top or sides of the webpage, a deceptive advertisement may appear for a place or group within Roblox. Most advertisements are legitimate and show users a small glance of what is to come, while others are clickbait, misleading, or a lie. Others claim you'll get absurd amounts of Robux or items in other experiences from visiting the experience, which is impossible. Some advertisements might say something along the lines of "I SPENT ALL MY ROBUX ON THIS AD, PLEASE JOIN MY EXPERIENCE" which use reverse psychology to get you to join their group or experience. There are also advertisements where popular celebrities are Roblox users and want you to join an experience or a group. More recently, advertisements have used a method of making it look like a particular user is on your friends list (most often, mrflimflam), and that you have recently visited their experience. This method only works if the advertisement loads while the user is navigated to their homepage.
Infamous false-advertisers[]
Jaredvaldez4 is arguably the most infamous deceptive-experience-developer. Through his various advertisements, he has gained tens of millions of place visits over multiple accounts. He is recognized for stealing other users' experiences and using false advertising to get users to visit his experiences. In the past, he has stolen several experiences, including Paintball, The Undead Coming, and Welcome to the Town of Robloxia. He then quit Roblox for a few years but is now trying to make a legitimate experience.
Other users who are known to have participated in similar behavior include JuliusColesV2.
Tactics to finding a false experience[]
- Users can reduce their odds of joining a deceptive experience by using the following techniques:
- Look at the experience's thumbnails. Oftentimes, misleading places will not have thumbnails related to Roblox, or they will have multiple thumbnails that aren't related to each other. Modern clickbait experiences have thumbnails that were taken from the thumbnails of Roblox-related YouTube videos from famous Roblox YouTuber celebrities, which can be spotted by the red-white Roblox logo in the thumbnail.
- Compare the experience's thumbs ups vs. thumbs downs, and assume that any experience with a disproportionate amount of thumbs downs is most likely misleading.
- If the experience has many unrelated tags, it is likely a bait-and-switch experience.
- The titles are something you should spot because if the text in it is in all-caps, it is usually either a meme or clickbait.
- If the experience's title and thumbnail rapidly change, then it is extremely likely to be a bait and switch experience.
- If the experience is a colorful obby with morphs at spawn and 3D models of characters in the sky, then it is recommended to leave. Many people do not recognize this, but this entire obby is a widely used free model, and it will NOT give you whatever it claimed it would give you at the end.
- If the experience has repeated words on the title or description, it is likely clickbait (example: OBBY OBBY OBBY OBBY OBBY OBBY OBBY). They will often repeat the names of popular video-game franchises or their characters, such as "Among Us", "Baldi," "Bendy," "Granny," "Mario," or others multiple times in the title and description. They also may repeat words of popular experiences such as Adopt Me! or Piggy.
- Look at an experience and check the number of free models. Usually, these experiences have icons full of free models, such as a family standing next to an exotic car, such as a Ferrari, Lamborghini, Bugatti, Tesla Roadster 2.0, Rolls Royce, Koenigsegg, or a W Motors Lykan in front of a huge house.
- Don't visit any free-Robux experiences. All of them are scams. None of them ever work.
- If the experience teleports you to another unrelated place, leave.
- If the experience tells you there is a surprise at the end, then ignore it. The surprise is usually either very underwhelming or simply a teleport to the developers' other experiences, to farm visits.
- If you found the experience from an advertisement, and it said "THEY VISITED MY EXPERIENCE!", or included several images of popular Roblox YouTubers, don't visit it as they are most likely lying to make you want to visit it.
Discontinuation of Tickets[]
As of April 14, 2016, tickets along with Trade Currency were removed, leading to deceptive advertising becoming less profitable for scammers. Nowadays, fake passes are used to scam Robux out of unsuspecting users.
Modern Baits[]
Nowadays, clickbait experiences are fairly-abundant. These types of experiences have improved rapidly from 2016 to today. Scam groups, such as ones named after popular Roblox YouTubers, have been creating a lot of false-advertisement experiences. This can easily appeal to younger users due to their inexperience in noticing obvious clickbait. Some experiences claim to give "free Robux", usually showing either a screen with a link to a fake "free Robux" website and directions on how to get said Robux or a simple obby, which when completed, asks for your login details, allowing the experience owner to compromise your account. The latter usually includes a fake People List of admins and famous users, and a fake chat that usually also has the account Roblox chatting in it with fake users.
Gallery[]
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