Intelligence failure: How the Roblox Mossad failed to stop a French spy from becoming Prime Minister (Patreon)

On the 7th August 2025, NeptuneEpix, the Roblox US's intelligence chief, made a startling announcement. Socha, the Israeli Prime Minister of a Roblox UN roleplay, United Nations Verse, offered to leak highly classified materials from the Israeli government to the United States.

Screenshots published by the US showed the Israeli Prime Minister offering classified information on the Mossad, the Israeli Ministry of Defence, and "ongoing intel operations" to US intelligence.

Slamming Socha's offer as a "breach [of] international and national security," NeptuneEpix publicly stated that they were "warn[ing] Israel[i] officials about their Prime Minister."

Yet, despite this public forewarning, later analysis would reveal that Socha retained access to classified cabinet materials over 10 hours after being publicly outed by US authorities.

The information Socha passed on to French intelligence, including transcripts of cabinet meetings, direct messages with the Mossad director, and other classified screenshots, ultimately exposed a mole within France's foreign ministry.

It also caused a reckoning for the embattled spy agency, still reeling from a separate devastating leak 72 hours prior that exposed the Mossad's top mole within the British government — the foreign secretary.

Yet, for all of his apparent failures, the head of Israel's spy chief did not roll.

When I interviewed the then Mossad director, Raider, for his side of the story, he made an equally startling claim.

The Mossad already had "fragments of intelligence," along with evidence of "behavioral irregularities and emerging patterns [that] tied [Socha] to espionage activity in France."

According to Raider, the Mossad already had credible suspicions that Socha had been working for French intelligence.

They just chose not to tell anyone about it.

The sophistication of intelligence agencies within MMOs can tell us a lot about inter-group competition.

The existence of dedicated counterintelligence teams in Habbo's agencies, for example, tells us that espionage by other groups was rampant enough to warrant their existence.

In contrast, the lack of any publicly acknowledged foreign intelligence services in certain Minecraft-based democracies, such as DemocracyCraft and CityRP, suggests a lack of active hostility between those servers. Exceptions to this, then, can also be very revealing in their own right.

Viewed from this lens, Roblox nation roleplay ("Ro-nation RP") is fiercely competitive. Intelligence agencies are ubiquitous in a world where Ro-nations compete for players, resources, and prestige.

This competition is amplified by the fact that anyone can set up their own Roblox group. Thus, a Roblox "United States" is competing not only with Ro-nations within its United Nations — of which there are several — but also with other Ro-nations that claim to be the legitimate United States of Roblox.

And that's not even mentioning conflicts based on the real world, such as the status of Roblox East Jerusalem.

Espionage, then, plays an important role in interactions between Ro-nations, from giving an edge in Ro-nation warfare to scoring propaganda victories.

"[Half of war is] fought [on] the battlefield, the rest [is] all intelligence," remarked BaguetteHolder, the President of Ro-France. "[There are spies] trying to infiltrate the other group, sabotage of internal conditions and the government, as well as a lot more."

"[The Mossad's] recruitment or operations weren't really made public except maybe [to show off some victories]," the former Israeli Prime Minister, Dadstate, commented. "I think a lot of countries ... [also] had paranoia that people joining their groups were Mossad [agents] and might have banned people for being [too] suspicious," they added.

When the Quai d'Orsay announced the arrest of France's ambassador to the UN, the foreign ministry did not skimp on fanfare.

Posting a highly dramatised video depicting the "arrest" of NotRobiee by French security forces, the foreign affairs spokesman IronSpartan accused the ambassador of spying on behalf of the Kosovan and Israeli intelligence services.

"Israel will pay for their offences far beyond human comprehension," vowed IronSpartan, adding that "France [also] demand[ed] an immediate explanation from Kosovo."

NotRobiee did not respond to a request for comment.

As it turned out, NotRobiee was not the Mossad agent operating in France's foreign ministry. French counterintelligence was wrong.

According to President BaguetteHolder, initial assessments by both the foreign intelligence agency, DGSE, and the internal intelligence agency, DGSI, pinned the blame on NotRobiee because they had access to the Quai d'Orsay group chat, but were seemingly inactive on it.

Files shared by Socha indicated that Kosovan intelligence — which had inexplicably landed in the hands of the Mossad — had access to low-level confidential information that could only have been obtained by a mole working within France's foreign ministry.

But as more and more information was parsed from Socha's leak, it became increasingly evident that NotRobiee was not the mole.

Kosovan intelligence had access to information that the ambassador was not privy to, such as details of a closed-door meeting with Kazakh officials, BaguetteHolder said. "[We] were able to pin down [Secretary of Trade] RijalulShuffle for the Espionage and Treason [instead]."

RijalulShuffle was later convicted by a French criminal court on treason and corruption charges.

When asked for comment, the former trade secretary maintained their innocence. "I got detained because my timezone matches with the leaked [group chat] screenshots," RijalulShuffle said. "But I [later] got [a pardon] from France."

France's shaky experience with mole catching, more broadly, highlights the unequal playing field between intelligence and counterintelligence in many MMOs.

While virtual intelligence agencies often have similar tools to their real-world counterparts to recruit moles abroad (e.g., the use of monetary bribes, the collection of Kompromat, the leveraging of ideology or ego), the same could not be said for tools to catch these moles.

The Roblox FBI cannot conduct "raids" on a person's private Discord server in the same way the real-world FBI could for a person's home. The Roblox DGSI cannot forcibly extract the direct messages of a civil servant in the same way the real-world DGSI could.

Accordingly, counterintelligence agencies have faced an uphill battle, with many struggling to develop strong counterintelligence practices.

The French government, for instance, required "all diplomatic staff to record their [D]iscord screen by checking [for potential] friend connections with Mossad and Kosovo [a]gents" during their hunt for the foreign ministry mole, according to RijalulShuffle. The security services likely used those videos to check for other details as well, such as time zones and Discord appearance settings, to see if they matched screenshots shared by the mole.

The British government, meanwhile, vowed to regularise the use of "background checks" — which involved checking the groups a Roblox player was a part of — following a scandal which exposed their foreign secretary as a Mossad spy.

Both of these practices can be defeated with basic operational security. A device's time zone can be manually changed, a separate browser can be used for intelligence sharing, and double agents can be instructed to simply not join self-incriminating Roblox groups, like ones helpfully named "the Mossad."

Faced with a lack of capabilities, some Ro-nations have turned to third parties to fulfil important counterintelligence duties. Discord bots such as "Double Counter," which supposedly "flag alt accounts, block raids and VPNs," have been used to do just that in some Ro-nation Discord servers. But these services are not foolproof.

Another way of approaching the disparity would be to embody the maxim "the best defence is a good offence." After all, France only identified the mole in its foreign ministry precisely because it had one of its own.

But even this approach can be fraught with difficulties, not least when the number of potential adversaries is not one of a few Ro-nations, but a United Nations's worth. Would France really have caught a Kosovan mole were it not for Israel's apparent infiltration of Kosovan intelligence?

In sum, counterintelligence remains a challenge for many nations on Roblox. Ro-Israel was not an exception.

When the Mossad director claimed the agency already had suspicions that Socha was a French mole, I asked the most obvious follow-up question: Why didn't the Mossad say anything?

"Regarding the case of Socha, revealing suspicions of him being a foreign agent would have been counterproductive at the time," he responded. "Public acknowledgement would have been more damaging than allowing the situation to continue, particularly given that it would have reflected poorly on our internal vetting processes."

To put it another way, Raider claimed that it would have been more embarrassing for the Mossad to pre-emptively expose Socha as a French spy than to just let him pilfer confidential information from the Israeli government.

When I conveyed this claim to the French President, they immediately rubbished it. "[The] Mossad had [zero] intelligence[.] [I]f they suspected Socha to be a spy[,] they would've had him captured and RP-executed. After the whole Socha situation, Israel became very paranoid about who became PM and took high ranking positions. This is just him covering face."

Former Israeli Prime Minister Dadstate expressed similar scepticism. "I think if [the Mossad] knew [Socha] wouldn't have access to those group chats in the first place." They added, "[I]f what [Raider] is saying is true[,] it [could] have been handled better."

Throughout my interview with Raider, the Mossad director made several extraordinary claims. Among many others, he claimed that:

The Mossad had intelligence on "other compromised cabinet members," but also chose not to disclose it.

The Mossad possessed "the capability to completely dismantle the French Discord server—but chose not to act on it due to platform guidelines."

The Mossad had "infiltrat[ed] multiple political offices and conduct[ed] intelligence-gathering efforts across nearly every nation represented within the United Nations." This was supposedly done by "deploying one to three assets into a target nation, where they would then work their way into positions within separate intelligence agencies—for example, the CIA."

But as I repeatedly asked for evidence for these claims, the director's answers became increasingly evasive.

I won't go into too much detail here since it could lead to moderation issues within the community ...

I can't provide a complete list of all operations, as this was quite a while ago and I don't recall every detail ...

I will not disclose the identities of any former assets, for reasons that should be self-explanatory ...

Sorry I am not providing evidence, its either to protect our assets identities as they are still active in the genre, or I have simply lost the DMs or whatever, and can't really be bothered looking for them cause its not a huge issue for me. I understand it would be beneficial to the credibility of your documentary but I'm just hoping you trust me.

The director did not produce a single piece of evidence to back up his claims.

"Raider is the least credible guy for any of this information," BaguetteHolder asserted. "He's not just an 'Ex-Intelligence Officer' who no longer has stakes in the game[;] he continuously works for intel agencies and has a reputation to defend."

Raider did not deny his continued involvement with Ro-nation RP, but maintained he had no reason to lie. "[I] wouldn[']t waste my time writing all of that just to lie in a community where [I'm] no longer active," he argued.

When I asked Raider whether he was using AI, such as ChatGPT, to help write his answers, his writing style inexplicably changed. "no, i mean u can run it through a ai detector or sum idc i didnt use ai also ai wouldnt know anything about this topic," he wrote.

He also provided another reason for supposedly withholding the evidence he had:

thats all the information ur getting out of me since u dont seem to trust me or think i even wrote these responses

Ultimately, Raider contends that Socha's appointment as Prime Minister was not an intelligence failure.

"We were already aware that there were moles within the cabinet, and instead of removing them outright, we leveraged their presence to feed controlled misinformation back to their handlers," Raider claimed. (He did not provide an example of "controlled misinformation" when asked about it.)

"[W]e maintained a calculated approach: continue operations as normal while using compromised individuals as channels for disinformation. In reality, none of them had access to intelligence of genuine value," he added.

Under Raider's leadership, the Mossad's foreign intelligence network was decimated. Using intelligence sourced from leaks within the Mossad and cabinet, moles across Britain, France, Kosovo, and the UNV were either whisked away by domestic security services or were pushed into premature retirement. For an agency so dependent on human assets, it is unclear how this was intelligence of no "genuine value."

"[P]ublic perception was never our priority," Raider summarised, seemingly contradicting his rationale for not pre-emptively exposing Socha. "Despite the leaks, Mossad remained fully operational and continued to function as the most efficient intelligence agency within the community."

All of that said, Raider also felt the need to distance himself from the decision to appoint Socha in the first place. "Socha's appointment as Prime Minister was largely the result of [the Israeli head of state] Atokad's trust in him."

To Raider's credit, this point was corroborated by two separate Israeli Prime Ministers, Dadstate and Newzerks, who both confirmed the centrality of Atokad's role in appointing PMs. "Only Atokad and [I] had full visibility into Mossad's structure and communications," Raider asserted, outlining the importance of the Israeli head of state.

(Of course, if Atokad had full access to the Mossad's intelligence, and if the Mossad had credible suspicions indicating that Socha was a French mole to begin with, it begs the question why Atokad would ever place their "trust" in Socha in the first place.)

In any case, wiping his hands clean, the Mossad director who helped orchestrate a coup d'état against the sitting Israeli Prime Minister just a week before Socha's appointment maintained there was nothing else he could have done.

"I did not have the ability to remove [Socha] directly and would have needed to escalate the matter through proper command channels," he concluded.

Atokad and Socha could not be reached out for comment.