Gen Z falls for online scams more than their boomer grandparents do. The generation that grew up with the internet isn’t invulnerable to becoming the victim of online hackers and scammers.::undefined
Millennials are probably the best at avoiding scams.
Unfortunately we also have no money to scam anyway.
It’s because of all that avocado toast.
I stopped eating avocado toast and now I own a mansion and 5 supercars.
I knew you could do it!
Plot twist: avocado toast is the scam.
Mmmmm scam
More scam, please
The cost of falling for those scams may also be surging for younger people: Social Catfish’s 2023 report on online scams found that online scam victims under 20 years old lost an estimated $8.2 million in 2017. In 2022, they lost $210 million.
Teenagers are bad at risk assessment…
This shouldn’t shock anyone, but it makes boomers feel good about themselves and their lead addled brains can’t handle the critical thinking to understand why this isn’t the win they think it’s is…
True. As a kid I’d fall for scams all the time, constantly downloading malware that would crash the family computer.
No way it went up 20x in 5yrs? There must be something weird with the data
Honestly a lot actually has changed in that time.
So much info has leaked that it’s a lot easier to phish users than ever. There are dumps of usernames and passwords, so you can know several websites they use as starting points for fraud.
Password reuse and credentials stuffing are also common now, which means if teens reuse passwords you can get into manu of their accounts.
Time online would naturally increase, but more importantly the pandemic would exacerbate that while also increasing the amount of people resorting to scamming.
There’s multiple parts to the equation, called confounding variables.
You mean kids don’t have enough life experience to spot scams at first glance? No way!
I’m surprised. Just like that time I was the 1,000,000th visitor of this well reputable website back in the day.
They can’t use computers! Sorry to generalise, but I was called a genius for using the task manager and just basic Word formatting. The thing is, we do have our 10,000 hours, maybe I am the equivalent of a chess grandmaster in Word. It’s just jarring to hear from a university student.
As a gen z, I agree-- I once used a terminal in front of one of my friends and he (unironically) asked if I was programming it myself.
From what I can see, it’s because “screens” got so much easier to use there’s been no need for countless nights of screaming at the laptop until you figure something out. I mean, it was not easy becoming fluent.
I am scared to see what will happen when iPad kids grow up and something doesn’t work, their understanding of an app is an icon with a label that you click so it opens. No troubleshooting skills whatsoever, even googling a problem isn’t an option for them.
I mean, there was that one time that I tried alpine linux w/sway and then spent ~30 minutes connecting to my friends wifi (this was when he asked if I was programming it myself).
Right, Linux printer drivers. I am the only person on the internet that solved the issue, as far as I can tell.
Same here, I have the nickname “hacker” at school just because I use an android and am tech savy. I have seen people that didn’t know what a folder was, thx apple, and thought I was hacking the school or smth when I updated some stuff in termux.
That’s wild to me that people consider using an android device to be technical in anyway. It’s literally designed to be user friendly enough for grandmas and grandpas to use. iPhones have really rotted some people’s brains.
It’s them blue message bubbles causing weird things to their brains.
Same here, I have the nickname “hacker” at school just because I use an android and am somewhat tech savy. I have seen people that didn’t know what a folder was, thx apple, and thought I was hacking smth when doing an update in Artix…
I think that generalization is acceptable.
Most avoid computers. My parents use’em and click everything they come across with. Decade ago I installed Linux in their shitty old computer, just so I can remove everything they can use to screw up the OS.
Everything was fine for few years till my father bought a new shitty low end computer from the black friday with all kinds of support and additional warranty BS that needed Windows with VNC that they really didn’t understand.
So, the result of that study is BS. One reason is that people selling old people expensive shit they don’t need is not considered a scam.
Boomer mother using Samsung flagship device to use WhatsApp and literally nothing else? That contract is absolutely a scam.
80yo grandma with a ultrafast 5G data plan bigger than mine. And her daily phone is a Doro that doesn’t even do text messages.
Late Gen X to early Millennial was the sweet spot between needing to know how a computer works and having a computer that just works. People before and after don’t have that experience.
I had a work colleague who had a spreadsheet with one column calculating something to do with a particular date. They didn’t have any formulas at all. For any calculations. They would go in each day and manually calculate and then type in the values. In every cell.
I put in an input cell date, and simplest of formulas in 3 cells, and they looked at me like I was some kind of wizard.
I returned to my desk, put my head in my hands in sheer shock. I still don’t understand what they thought a spreadsheet was for…It made.nice columns?
Anyways, when I recovered, I finished my resignation letter,.and that was the best thing I ever did in that particular cesspool 😁
There is a split in gen Z: The ones who didnt use a computer growing up and those that did have one (and also the time to mess around with it). But I feel like you cant group them together.
When I spoke to my younger half-brother a few years back I was stunned to find out he only had an Xbox and phone. No PC. I think he’s doing well academically but how the fuck he lived without a proper PC I’ll never know.
I think my dad and his mum refused to get him one to protect him cos they didn’t let him play GTAV either. It was too violent.
I shudder to think WTF he’ll do when AI comes along.
That’ll be a very pronounced split in Millenials and Gen X as well.
Gen Z are 11 to 26, younger when this study was done. Take out the youngest cohort of Gen Z and the oldest cohort of Boomers, then show me the new statistics. This is how you mislead with data.
They never played Runescape and it shows
One does not simply buying gf
They never heard of Theresa Fidalgo and it shows
Boomers fall for online scams because they aren’t aware of how powerful the internet can make bad actors.
Zoomers fall for online scams because they’re younger and simply inexperienced dealing with scam artists.
Millennials fall for online scams because we’re lonely and really want the friendly Indian guy we’re talking to to get their itunes gift card.
Gen X would love to fall for online scams however everyone keeps forgetting them.
in fairness, it’s because y’all answer every question with “Yeah, totally…” and no one has any idea whether you’re being sarcastic
Radical dude.
Yeah, totally…
Word
Gen Z is also less tech savvy even though they’ve only known devices and screens since they were born so this isn’t surprising.
Even though? I don’t think it’s a correct assumption that “devices” would or should make you tech savvy. Smartphones and tablets makes you less tech savvy I’d say. Proper desktop OS computers is where it’s at.
It doesn’t matter if it’s smartphone or desktop it’s the not quite working part is what got millennials tinkering and understanding technology
Fuck desktop OS computers. You can be completely tech illiterate if you use MacOS and Windows only. Hell, even a lot of modern Linux distros are basically “Linux with training wheels.” You want to get really tech literate? Do what I did and use nothing but vanilla Arch for around 3 years, constantly installing new things that broke my install and having to fix it or just reinstall at least once every two months. The greatest teacher isn’t necessity. It’s frustration. The second greatest is the arch linux wiki.
I literally can’t tell if this is supposed to be a serious comment or a shitpost copypasta.
Little bit of both.
“i use arch btw”
I dont think this is the case. I feel like there just is a much wider gap because some people grow up without a computer (they may have one but not see the use of it) and others do. I bet you’d be surprised both at how non-tech-savvy and at how tech-savvy some genZ-ers are.
I have had people asking me for help because their “keyboard was capitalizing everything” (caps lock was on) or being amazed by touch typing. But there are also many people who are (at least somewhat) tech-savvy and it’s not so few people either.
What I’ve heard, and what makes sense, is that Millenials had to learn technology and troubleshoot all the issues for their parents.
Now that they’re grown up, they continue to troubleshoot issues for their kids and fix any issues.
So their kids don’t get that same experience.
This is more of a generalization of course, there are absolutely genZ-ers who are tech savvy.
It is the case. The generation that grew up with an iPad never had to learn to use a file system.
Except gen Z didn’t grow up with just an iPad, at least not the majority. A good amount of people had (or have) access to a laptop or family computer. Thats why I say that the gap has just gotten wider. Some people, eg. the ones that just had an iPad and all they ever did was social media and mobile games - sure, they know very little about computers. But the ones that did use computers (and thats not a small amount) do really know how to use it - which is not limited to the more or less office-focused skills of older generations.
I think you raised a good point. A household where one or both parents is heavy into coding or missing would probably help them more than a household that only relies on ‘smart’ technology. Either of those options would be way more helpful for these skills than growing up without any technology, which is just reality for a lot of people.
I know someone from Gen Z who is horrible with computers. I also know someone from Gen Z who is fantastic with computers.
To be honest, I don’t think any generation is immune to this, despite what some want to think.
My personal experience might be biased, but I’ve also seen a lot of millenials in their early to mid 30s who struggle with almost anything online. Too damn many. I’ve also seen some people from Gen X who are beyond tech illiterate. We don’t really talk about those guys though.
There is still time to fix this problem with the younger Gen Z, but there’s almost never any discussion about actually doing that either. “Gen Z” also includes kids who are around 12, but we often act like Gen Z all grew up into adults. Let’s get some of that school funding back ffs! Kids have to learn from somewhere, and many of their parents seem to not care about teaching them any of this stuff.
Many of us were lucky enough to grow up when most of this technology was still developing. We HAD to troubleshoot things if we wanted them to work. Fewer things were locked behind “customer service” and crappy warranties. You could physically open things up to fix them without having such a high risk of breaking them in the process.
I’ve also seen some people from Gen X who are beyond tech illiterate. We don’t really talk about those guys though.
First rule of Gen X is that we don’t talk about Gen X.
They’ve only known devices which were built with such a curated UX that they never tried to troubleshoot problems for themselves. When I was a kid you had to be able to figure out how to edit config files and tweak registry keys to get your PC game to run. These days everything is so smooth and seamless. Oh sure, stuff still breaks. But the computers are pocket sized and run on a locked-down OS, so there’s no point trying to troubleshoot them yourself.
The difference now is that in the olden days when something broke you could fix it if you had enough technical know how. For some reason that doubtless involves money that I do not care to learn, companies have invested a staggering amount of R&D into making fixing anything as close to impossible as they can make it unless you are an authorized service technician.
Pop the hood on a modern car, you can change the wiper fluid and that’s about it. Apple is proud of their walled garden and parts pairing and is considering charging for the privilege of sideloading apps. Most applications nowadays don’t even show crash report data to the user and error messages are getting less and less descriptive for fear of being confusing. The only thing you can really pop the hood on nowadays is webpages, and even then you’ll often have to do at least an hour’s worth of reverse engineering to get anywhere useful.
That’s not the result of advancement, it’s the result of obfuscation. It’s a deliberate trend among companies to make us powerless to manage our own devices. They absolutely could make them in a way that is simple enough for an end-user to understand if they really wanted to.
Regardless of what caused it, the fact remains that people stopped learning how to fix their own crap because there’s hardly anywhere they can apply those skills.
I’m in a particularly techy subset of gen Z. Every electronic device I own is either jailbroken or running a different operating system than the one it shipped with. I use Linux exclusively which is a fancy way of saying I’m used to having to fix things when they break without any instructions on how to do that. I have trouble with tech meant for normies. They hide so much complexity it makes them impossible to troubleshoot. How can I expect people who were raised on tech meant to be seamlesa to mend the inevitable seams when I don’t know how?
It’s not their fault, is what I’m saying. I agree that interfaces nowadays are too user friendly.
Exposure to technology does not automatically breed expertise. I have a 15 year old. Smart phones have existed for her entire life. She knows how to use Snapchat and take goofy selfies. That’s where her expertise ends. Any time anything is wrong, she sounds like her grandma complaining “mY mOdEm DoEsNt WoRk!” It’s not a modem grandma! That’s your computer! Most of her friends are the same way.
And “WiFi” is synonymous for “Interenet connection” to them.
Yea, kiddo, the WiFi is working just fine, but the ISP crapped its pants and you can’t connect to anything past this house.
My partner is a millennial who grew up with computers, but never got too technical with them. She was confused when I told her that our WiFi was down at the router, but we still had an internet connection.
“If we have internet, why can’t I connect?”
Because the WiFi isn’t working.
“But you said we still have an internet connection.”
Well, I do, and so would you if you’d let me run an ethernet cable to your office, too!"
“…but if there’s no WiFi, why does the cable work?”
Lol
Not to mention most ISP marketing is pretty loose in its terminology. Most if not all radio or tv ads these days seem to interchange internet and wifi as if they are one and the same on a daily basis.
ie. All ads stating something along the lines of “subscribe to whole home wifi for a low monthly fee.”
I have too many conversations on both sides of the age gap trying to explain the difference between supplying your own router with its own wifi capabilities as opposed to a ISP modem/router combo.
I’ve had this conversation so many times with my partner. She’s on an older laptop in a room that’s directly through a pretty thick wall from the router, but its still a short distance to bring an Ethernet over, and she’s always using her laptop only at her desk there anyway.
She’s always yelling at me (who have my desk right next to the router, and everything I use has Ethernet ) that the internet is down again and that she really needs it right now, because work.
But no, getting angry at me that I should do something about it is fine, but that something apparently shouldn’t mean the most feasible solution.
I’m not dealing with a WiFi extender for a spot that’s literally like 8 meters from the router, for her 100mbs WiFi card.
But it’s her loss, at least I have the remaining 900mbps for myself from our plan…
Here, you can plug this into your laptop whenever the WiFi goes down and you need internet RIGHT AWAY. If you don’t need it urgently, then you don’t have to plug it in.
“But wires are ugly!”
Not if you keep them organized!
“No, they’re just ugly! Just fix the wifi so this doesn’t happen anymore!”
…yes dear
When you grow up around something being easy to use, you lose the intricate understanding that used to be necessary.
For Gen X and Millennials, it’s probably cars and/or electronics.
Busted light switch cover? Better call an electrician “just in case”.
Need to replace an air filter? Better take it to the shop.
Not sure where the line is, but I had a Gen X woman tell me that she needs to take the car to the dealership to get her air pressure adjusted. When I showed her how to take off the cap on the tire’s air pressure valve, she looked at me as if I had just pried off her steering wheel, lol
Not sure where the line is drawn, and there are definitely some people in those generations who know those things. But I’d bet Boomers and earlier generations had a better understanding on average.
To be fair, cars are becoming less and less serviceable.
I had a light bulb that died on my car, and tried to change it myself. How hard could that be?
Turns out the light bulb is so buried under the engine I ended up giving up and bringing it to the shop. And often even independent shops can no longer service cars, you have to bring it to your maker’s dealership because only they have the proprietary tooling to fix it.
As a car enthusiast and backyard mechanic, this is precisely why I prefer to own older vehicles. If something goes wrong with my '06, I can handle that. My friends/family members with newer cars, by and large, can’t even handle their own basic maintenance because of the way things are designed now. It’s worse than planned obsolescence, it’s engineered difficulty.
Want to change the oil? Good luck! the filter is behind the engine and right next to the exhaust cause fuck you. At this point I’ll look at getting a roller and doing an EV swap.
I tried to replace my sister’s serpentine belt a couple summers ago. Simple, basic maintenance, right? Turns out, the only way to turn the tensioner, was from underneath the car. I’m still mad about it.
That feels like it should be illegal.
wish i could say i’m surprised. i’m gen z myself and i’d say i’m pretty decent with not being an idiot with technology. i do the usual stuff like running firefox + uBlockOrigin and i’m also a linux user. anyways, people at my school are just… so dumb with technology. a bunch of people have lost permission to use their school chromebooks and a computer at school because they got malware on it. either by going to a pirate site or just clicking a random download button (my school doesn’t allow us to use adblockers). not to mention that most of them believe that macs cannot get malware. so yeah, i’m unfortunately not surprised with this
I thank getting into pcgaming for pushing me towards tech literacy. With how simplified tech has gotten and most usage being phones it’s not surprising so many are more clueless than boomers who were at least forced to use PCs in an office setting.
that’s similar to what happened to me. i wanted to make a ROM hack for super mario world. fast forward 3 years later and im now using a jailbroken iphone and dual booting win10 and fedora
(my school doesn’t allow us to use adblockers)
wtf why
Because you can potentially install other extensions, chrome and edge will suck with uBO soon anyway, and you cant install exe’s or chocolatey, too restricted.
yeah that’s probably it
i really wish i knew
Same here, people look at me like an alien when I say that I use an android (no root anything) or a jailbroken iPhone. I’ve met people that don’t even understand the concept of a folder…
Getting malware on a chromebook is hard. How did they manage that. I thought it was even more locked down than ios?
i’m honestly not sure. i should probably ask the school IT guy because he had to ban a few people from using chromebooks. we are allowed to download things so that’s probably it though.
King of obvious really by the sheer volume of manosphere, crypto, etc grift content out there.
genX are the perps. shhhh dont tell anyone. no one knows were here
This is also why we are more likely to notice it. Some of us could teach the scanners a thing or two.
Yeah I’d say growing up coding in Basic on DOS machines, and logging onto BBSes gives us a leg up over millenials who at best started with AOL and Windows 98
If there’s one thing I’ve noticed about Gen Z purely from interacting with them online it’s that they’re incredibly, remarkably gullible. Like, broadly resistant to the concept of facetiousness, sarcasm, or that they might be being taken for a ride. They take everything at face value. I once made the joke on reddit that the greatest Disney villain of all time was Cobra Bubbles from Lilo and Stitch because his backstory was that he used to work for the CIA before becoming a social worker, which meant there was a non-zero percent chance he helped train Osama Bin Laden in insurgency tactics in the 1980s and was therefore indirectly responsible for 9/11. The zoomers were both confused and outraged because they believed me entirely at face value. I would imagine them applying a similar degree of online literacy to your average dark pattern scam that said “click here for free V Bucks.” There are no V Bucks, dog. There’s never any V Bucks.
I’m not sure that is any different than any other generation. Hell, I doubt you know the age of all the people you’re talking about.
If you ask my grandparents the whole US is being destroyed by immigrants despite their day-to-day being the same for decades.
All I gotta do is point out Newsmax and Fox News viewership to counter this stupid Zoomer vs Boomer shit. Just because they are less terminally online doesn’t mean they are less gullible.
*Person criticizes Zoomers*
Random Zoomer: “Yeah, well, THE BOOMERS ARE WORSE.”
I’m not even a zoomer. I’m just trying to not be sensationalist like the source.
By the source I assume you mean me, and not the article. Because I’m not being sensationalist. I’m being unfair and judgmental. Very different things.
No I mean the source. You’re just being anecdotal and that’s ok.
Vox is being charitable to the Zoomers, though, observing that “Gen Z simply uses technology more than any other generation and is therefore more likely to be scammed via that technology.” The original study is also in a peer reviewed journal. It’s not making judgment calls about Zoomers. It’s aggregating statistical data. You can read the article here: https://vc.bridgew.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1052&context=ijcic
From the discussion of findings at the end of the article, the researchers observed that
“It is reasonable to assume that the safer practices the older group self-reported is accompanied by greater knowledge of information security simply because of the additional years of being engaged in a digital-technology world. Specifically, it was hypothesized that Generation Y would rank higher than Generation Z adults on the OSBBQ Cybersecurity Awareness subscale, and significant differences were observed for half of the items included in the analysis.”
And also that
“From a developmental perspective, it is possible that the normal adaptations that occur throughout one’s life impacted how individuals in this study perceived the literal meaning of the items. This could be due to cultural differences inherent to their generational cohort and the individual experiences that occur over time with age. For example, people tend to lose their sense of invulnerability as hey age (Denscombe & Drucquer, 1999) and generation Y adults grew up in a world where adapting to privacy and cybersecurity threats were first becoming more commonplace. These individuals are now at an age where the realities of (online) risk have become part of their conscious awareness as it relates to their lack of invulnerability.”
Like, this formal study is incredibly generous in its discussion of why Gen. Z might be shown to be more statistically likely to fall for online scams than other cohorts. It also goes into great detail to explain its own limitations as a study.
That study seems to be a survey of college students knowledge of cyber security not anything to do with what you were claiming before as there are no boomers in question.
I have no evidence of who’s falling for my ‘trolling’ online but it’s very similar to what you describe. I’ll make some absurd, nonsense claim or insult them using flowery nonsense language that can’t possibly be taken seriously - but they do!
I suggested that Java devs (programmers) are the reason we’ll never have FTL engines. They took me seriously!
Yet there’s other times you’ll get obviously younger people screaming in comments under videos “FAKE!” because they can’t conceive that the video’d thing could happen.
In that instance I can understand it to a degree because they don’t have the lived years experience to compare what they’re seeing on screen. You’ll get them claiming “that would never happen” or “people don’t do that and if you think it’s real go touch grass” and I’m thinking - “hang on that’s happened to me at least 3 times”.
I understand it’s probably just the arrogance of youth but it’s quite shocking at times just how confident they can be of their own ignorance.
I know people who teach high school and they say that Gen Z has both an extreme degree of personal esteem and that they won’t take shit from anyone who disparages who they fundamentally are as people (like people giving shit for them being from immigrant families, being POCs, being LGBT, etc.), which is fantastic - no one should ever put up with shit like that. But they also seem to have a very hard time organizing their thoughts and making logical conclusions from structured evidence. Like they can’t write a paper making an argument for something and providing evidence for why something is a certain way. It’s all stream of consciousness. I think that as a generational cohort they might be more inclined towards “unstructured thought” or perhaps “stream of consciousness” than other generations. As old as I might sound because of this opinion, I do think that the fact that they interact with information almost entirely through mobile devices is a potential component of that. The mechanisms and mediums by which you consume information arguably shape how you process information.
I think they’re way more used to just giving information away without thinking about it. “They have everything already, why fight it” just plays into the hands of scammers.
