Deceptive advertising

To see misleading place images on Roblox, go to Misleading place images.

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 a game while the game is different. A developer of a misleading advertisement most likely has malicious intents, such as trying to get ratings or become famous online.

False Advertising Methods

Different tactics have been used to lure players to their places which have no connection to the content advertised.

False Thumbnail

Main article: Misleading place images

Thumbnails are made for players to preview the creator's place and/or present game art, logos, and video previews via YouTube. However, some places have images that might be misleading and possibly may not represent the actual game. Deceptive advertisers very often use famous YouTubers like DanTDM and Denis which makes their game get instantly to the front page. These games have a low rating and get deleted by ROBLOX after a few days.

Misleading Title

The game's title represents what the place is about. Deceptive builders often utilize the title space to attract users into their game, such as having a title of "Fall 9,999,999 Feet to your Death" when the game is actually an obstacle course. Many builders advertise their game through reverse psychology, oftentimes writing "Don't play my game" as a way to lure players into playing it.

Game Teleporters

With the release of inter-game teleporters, builders can utilize alternate accounts to attract players into multiple games, with those games ultimately teleporting the players into the main builder's game. These games are typically one-player servers that use deceptive advertising techniques such as misleading place images and titles and are often on the Top Rated section of the games page. Inter-game teleporters occasionally can crash a player's ROBLOX client.

Like-Bots

Like-Bots are bots that automatically thumbs up a place to hit the top area of Top Rated. Often, places that use Like-Bots are Game Teleporters. An easy way to find them is to look at the visits compared to likes + dislikes. If the visits are lower than likes + dislikes, then the owner has used a Like-Bot. However, as of April, 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.

Deceptive Advertisements

At the top or sides of the webpage, a deceptive advertisement would appear for a place or group within ROBLOX. Most advertisements are legitimate, and shows users a small glance of what is to come, while others are clickbait, misleading or lie. Some claim to turn you from a bacon hair to a person with lots of robux. Other claim you'll get 1M+ robux from playing the game in general.

Infamous False Advertisers

Main article: Controversial Players and List of Bait and Switch Users

Jaredvaldez4 is arguably the most infamous deceptive game developer. Through his various advertisements, he has gained tens of millions of place visits over multiple accounts. He is recognized for stealing other user's games and using false advertising in order to get users to play his games. In the past, he has stolen a number of games, including Paintball, The Undead Coming, and Welcome to the Town of Robloxia. Jared Valdez quit Roblox following the termination of several of his accounts.

Other users who are known to have participated in similar behavior include JuliusColesV2.

Tactics to finding a false game

Players can reduce their odds of joining a deceptive game by using the following techniques:

Look at the game'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 games have thumbnails that were taken from the thumbnails of ROBLOX-related YouTube videos from famous ROBLOX YouTubers, which can be spotted by the red-white Roblox logo in the thumbnail.
Compare the game's thumbs ups vs thumbs downs, and assume that any game with a disproportionate amount of thumbs downs is most likely misleading.
If the game has a bunch of unrelated tags, it is likely a bait and switch game.
The titles are something you should spot because if the text in it is all caps or says "Do not play!!" or something else. If it's like this then don’t click on the play button.
Most clickbait games use their group name as the game's creator. The group's name would usually end with "Fan Club" "Games" or "Studios".
If the game's title and thumbnail rapidly change, then it is likely to be a bait and switch game.
if the game says free admin then don't play it, its a scam, it can steal your account.
If the game has repeated words on the title or description, its likely clickbait (example: OBBY OBBY OBBY OBBY OBBY OBBY OBBY ). These game developers have found an exploit in the Roblox search algorithm, as repeating words such as "obby" and "tycoon" (or as sudden trends go) "Baldi" "bendy" or "granny" multiple times in the title and description abuse the search algorithm and makes their games appear at the top of the search.
Don't go to any games that have useless free models.
Don't play any free robux games. These are a scam.

Ticket discontinuation

As of April 14th, 2016, tickets along with Trade Currency were removed. This made users who use deceptive advertising not to get money as they got before, and they no longer can convert tickets into ROBUX. But the deceptive advertising still continues, and users can still get ROBUX from fake game passes.

Modern Baits

Nowadays, it's really common to find clickbait games. These types of games have improved rapidly throughout 2016 all the way to today. Scam groups, such as ones named after popular ROBLOX YouTubers, have been creating a lot of false advertisement games. This can easily appeal to younger ROBLOX users due to their inexperience in detecting clickbait. Some games say they can give you "free robux". These games usually either show you a screen with a link to a fake free robux website and directions on how to get the robux. Other kinds of these games include ones with a simple obby and then you have to put in your account details so that the developer can steal your account. These games usually have a fake chat that has the account Roblox chatting in it with fake players.