Anyone can get scammed online, including the generation of Americans that grew up with the internet.
If you’re part of Generation Z — that is, born sometime between the late 1990s and early 2010s — you or one of your friends may have been the target or victim of an online scam. In fact, according to a recent Deloitte survey, members of Gen Z fall for these scams and get hacked far more frequently than their grandparents do.
Compared to older generations, younger generations have reported higher rates of victimization in phishing, identity theft, romance scams, and cyberbullying. The Deloitte survey shows that Gen Z Americans were three times more likely to get caught up in an online scam than boomers were (16 percent and 5 percent, respectively). Compared to boomers, Gen Z was also twice as likely to have a social media account hacked (17 percent and 8 percent). Fourteen percent of Gen Z-ers surveyed said they’d had their location information misused, more than any other generation. 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.
Correlation does not imply causation.
- People who spend more time online will be exposed to more scams, and therefore are more likely to fall for one. If you don’t see any scams because you don’t know how to open “the internet”, you won’t see scams you can fall for.
- Gen Z could just be more likely to self report. Self-reporting fault or failure is less socially acceptable among the culture of the boomer generation. Entirely possible Boomers are just lying or not self-reporting.
Boomers could also be unaware they were victims of most of these. They think internet scams start and end with nigerian princes
What about millennials then? We spend a lot of time online and yet are doing better
We’re the ones doing the scamming
Roblox shareholders: *collective nod*
Child labor has never been easier!
We were there when they sprouted.
We had pop-up browser window JavaScript viruses that looked real and Nigerian princes, we are just suspicious of everything free.
Looking at you, sexy pole dancing girl that knows my mother’s sister‘s nephew‘s roommate‘s father‘s credit card number.
We don’t have 15-year-old immature brains. Gen z are lovely bunch, but many of their brains are still baking.
Years go fast my man, gen z can be up to 26 years old
Millennials sure lost a shit ton of money to crypto scams over the past 6 years.
The difference I think is that we grew up with the technology. We saw the democratisation of the internet which makes us generally “smarter” on that front. We also had to fiddle and understand the technology more than Gen Z has to. It’s also probably far easier to scam/get scammed nowadays with crypto bros and influencers being absolutely everywhere.
There is actually a rather legitimate understandable reason why boomers may not self report ; shame and fear their children will no longer trust them to take care of themselves.
Also would like to add this included cyberbullying and that had to inflate the numbers. How many boomers are victims of bullying vs students?
That’s what the article is saying as well (but nobody reads those)
Self-reporting fault or failure is less socially acceptable among the culture of the boomer generation.
Inter-generational criticism is the resort of a bitter and stupid person, no matter the generation in question.
Oh wow thanks so much for the free psychoanalysis. Now do you - what does it say about you that you make ad hominem attacks against people you’ve never met on internet forums and then get downvoted for it?
That I speak my mind and have unpopular opinions. I’m not ashamed of it.
You should be.
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I’m curious: are you the kind of person who thinks all generalizations are bad?
Generalizations are, by definition, inaccurate. I don’t know if that’s what you mean by “bad,” but if it is, that’s not my opinion, it’s just what the word means.
Somewhat related, but not really: I hear that Gen Z (in general) are worse at tech support issues than the past couple generations. The theory is that Gen Z grew up with tech that, for the most part, “just works”. Troubleshooting issues isn’t as common, and isn’t as necessary of a skill.
especially with mobile phones now, look at iPhone for example, it’s so user friendly that if you try to do anything remotely advance you need to jump through hoops to do it. I had a sales person try to tell me that the iPhone was expandable because it had cloud storage capability, they didn’t know what a Micro SD card was and that it used to be able to go in all the flagship phones. Pretty disappointing
The iphone has always sacrificed user freedom to provide a streamlined experience a monkey could make work.
Mostly it’s that everything on phones/tablets/touch screens is an app. You don’t pick where to install it. You don’t need to look up save files.
Some of them are getting to college without ever needing to go through a file directory, so they don’t necessarily even have the basics to troubleshoot.
Same thing happened with cars: boomers used to troubleshoot a lot of car issues themselves, and then somewhere along the line cars got good enough that people stopped learning how to do their own maintenance and now most people don’t even change their own oil.
As technology matures, inevitably users stop worrying about self repair and just hire professionals to do it for them.
Honestly I feel like a dying breed among my middle-class millennial dad-friends.
I’m like the only person who changes their own oil. All the rest of them just drive electric cars.
To be fair that sounds like a good thing
I mean, modern applications don’t even give you an error more often than not.
GenX will forever be the best “jack of all trades” in tech. Someone once said we “straddled the digital divide”, and that will never happen again. At least not until something as radical as the Industrial Revolution or Information Age comes around.
We had to figure shit out. No internet, nothing, make it happen or it don’t work, and you don’t get to play.
Gen Z frustrate the hell out of me sometimes. “Um, my laptop is doing something funny, I need a new one.”
Dear Zoomers:
I love you guys, you have so much heart and clarity of purpose.
But goddamn you guys are slow
Couldn’t this just be a reporting bias? Boomers wouldn’t even realise getting scammed, and if they do, would be too proud to report it.
An anecdote that both supports your perspective and offers an alternative explanation.
My father in law kept falling for the same scam. Something about straightening out his credit card billing for some service he never ordered. But the scammer needed his information to access the online account, but he didn’t have that even set up, so he’d hang up, call his credit card company, and try to complain to them about a problem that didn’t exist.
Another scam about paying balances he didn’t have would result in him mailing checks to his regular credit card company, who would just credit his account to negative balance and it would work out fine.
He’d generally never even recognize it as a scam, even when flat out told by his family or the credit card company.
So his gullible nature was largely cancelled out by not dealing with this online stuff, which is a critical component of how the scams tend to work.
When the low int character keeps rolling critical success on skill checks.
We might have a different bias at play - a boomer able to adjust to new media and do an online Deloitte survey are self selected as being intelligent and have strong critical thinking skills. While i would be hard-pressed to find a zoomer that couldn’t do an online survey.
At the end of the day the selection bias may not apply in a meaningful way as the type of boomer unable to navigate through a simple multiple choice survey would likely not be using the internet in the first place.
For example my dad is 73 and has never used a computer in his life. Worked as a gardener and never needed it for work. He sends letters to his close ones or lets me or my mom do the typing for him. So there’s 0 chance of him getting scammed.
The younger boomers and older gen X would have likely used computers for about 30 years now so would be much more adapted to it as this point. It’s not the year 2000 anymore
Young men are always more likely to fall for investment scams
the magic internet money was a scam sure, but collectible jpegs will surely be my ticket to easy stre- shit.
Gambling in general is something a lot of young men seem to be falling for. I suspect they always have. “I won £400 last week!”, ignoring the 12 weeks previous where they lost £100 a time. For my father’s generation it was horses, for mine it was the football, now it’s crypto.
Every generation gotta make its own mistakes, I guess.
Boomers wouldn’t admit to falling to a scam
GenZ still trends fairly young. The difference is that the stakes are much lower. Millennial kids got scammed in RuneScape, GenZ kids get scammed in Minecraft or whatever. When you are youung you fall for dumb shit and that helps you learn and grow so that you don’t hand over your pin number to someone claiming to be from the bank when you are age 75.
GenZ kids get scammed in Minecraft or whatever.
Gen Z spans 1997-2012. The oldest Zoomers are 26 years old. But I agree that the phrase is used colloquially to mean kids much younger than that.
Minecraft was released in 2011, when the oldest Zoomers were 14 years old, and the youngest hadn’t been born yet. Seems like a good game to associate with that generation.
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The other difference is that the measurement is “scammed ONLINE”. Boomer generation will have fewer numbers overall that are heavy participants on the Internet, which I think would increase the chances of running into an online scam.
My mom barely even knows how to use a smartphone. So she’s not likely to be involved online long enough to interact with something that would scam her. However if she DID run into a scam, I’m pretty sure my mom would 100% fall for it.
It was UO for me. My friend had that fancy golden (or maybe fire idk it was so long ago) robe for however many years of service it took and some dude tricked him out of it lmao. It was so long ago but I would 100% have fallen for the same thing at the time. I just got lucky and learned the lesson through my poor buddy
Gen X got scammed by that damned hustler at the Street Fighter cabinet.
Damn him, he knew the input to select Akuma! That’s no fair!
NFTs? Worked with a few young people who thought they could make money flipping those.
From the outside it seems to me that NFTs were mostly bought by millennials with disposable income for the first time in their 30s.
Fake Bad Bunny tickets got the only zoomer I know, she was out $200, but that’s not a great sanple size.
Sometimes this “dumb shit” that they fall for isn’t dumb shit that just teaches you a lesson, but rather quite predatory, such thinking you are getting blackmailed to share photos of yourself.
The biggest scam of my generation was PVP in the wilderness. They made it sound like it was going to be cool but all it ended up being was fascist gangs farming for GP. It was only once the Venezuelans (read: communists) unionized and kicked the gangs out did they remove PVP.
Not really surprising considering how much more time gen z spends on the internet. And how many members haven’t even graduated high school yet.
I think people forget that the internet has fully supplanted television and unlike the 90’s home that had a TV that was somehow always on (or at least that’s how it was at my Aunts house in the 90s), people these days while away their hours fully plugged into the internet. I would suspect people who watched a lot of television were more likely to fall for scams on TV, too (my Aunt, for example, believes literally everything on FOX News). Internet scams are far more of a free-for-all than television ever was.
Also how many gen z have grown up with amazing technology but don’t really understand it at all. It just works.
Not like previous generations that had to learn more in depth to make shit work because it was buggy as hell or just plain wasn’t user friendly at all.
According to the dates provided the youngest zoomers are just now joining 8th grade. How useful is that data really?
They’re also susceptible to getting their phone stolen, people accessing their computer they left open in class and a whole lot of threat vectors boomers and millenials aren’t susceptible to (or not anymore)
From the generation before this, I always thought the “mobile generation”'s computer savviness had been overrated. Mobile phones (especially iOS) are like a walled garden compared to using a PC and Windows. It was easy to shoot yourself in the foot on Windows 98, etc so you learnt to be careful very quickly. Likewise, there’s no jumping into the registry or terminal, no built in zip/rar handling, warnings from the OS, built in Malware protection, etc
The internet was a wild place in the 90s and this generation never really experienced that. Forums had lax moderation and could be full of troll links to “I am an idiot”, goatse, etc. Files could be hosted on random webpages and the downloads could contain anything: often a virus alongside the actual file, etc
I remember not using an antivirus as Norton and co would crush your machine, so you just had to tread extremely carefully
Entirely true. Gen Z is not “tech smart.”
While we’re on the topic of shit boomers and zoomers fall for:
STOP
RAWDOGGING
RANDOM
HYPERLINKS
On another topic, go to this link to get free Apple Gift card point.
Android users can go Here for Google Play cards
So this is a genuine question. When doing research online you have to click on random websites/links. How do you protect yourself from that?
Use Firefox and run uBock Origin, Noscript, and Privacy Badger extensions. If something seems suspicious, google the url and see if people are talking about it.
i can’t use firefox and i had to turn off noscript forgot why though… i use/do everything else, so i guess i’m kind of safe.
No script is not an easy tool. By default, it breaks 99% of websites. It has become a game for me though to approve the lowest amount of scripts to make a site run, but I realize this is definitely not for everyone.
Check the url. Not what the link displays as, right click or hover that shit and see what the real url is.
Don’t follow links to sus.minemycrypto.sudan
Not even to win an internet argument.
As an older member of the cohort I’ve noticed a certain gap. Those of us who grew up when computers were just becoming a thing for everybody (sorry gen X I know you were first but they were expensive luxuries rather than ubiquitous) had to learn to fix shit all the time and got to learn about the dangers more or less as they came into being, computers still weren’t entierly user friendly and learning was encouraged by the fact that it didn’t take much knowhow to do things like play an entire game by just downloading the free trial over and over and moving your save file.
Past a certain line however (I think the 2000s to 2010s kids) computers became much more of a black box and companies like apple were making ‘it just works’ user interfaces that required very little fixing but also gave you very little control if you didn’t already know where to look. So we got that disconect of a group that are very comfortable with computers but don’t understand much about how they work and get bombarded with all the dangers of the internet at once rather than having had the chance to learn them as they came about.
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Remember building a computer and being excited it turned on the first time, so you could decode the error beeps to see what it components didn’t work?
Can you reword your comment to remove the word “removed” please? Otherwise, I have to remove it as the admins have made it clear that this word is not welcome here due to its bigoted, hateful, and potentially offensive nature, and the use of the word as an insult is discouraged.
Mods like you are the problem go back to Reddit.
If enforcing instance-wide rules is an issue for you, I have bad news about any forums you choose to join in the future.
Not only is it against instance rules, but the comment was reported multiple times for being hateful and offensive, if it doesn’t personally offend you that is wonderful, it doesn’t change the bigoted nature of the word, and that it does offend some people. I gave OP 3 hours to edit the comment before I removed it, if anything that’s quite the opposite of Reddit moderation, where you’d simply have a comment removed and receive a ban instantly.
Felt like Reddit to me, including the 24 hour ban. You can say what you want, but in the context of its use it was nothing special. All I see are people drooling to be offended by something that was not offensive, and then a mod stepped in, spouted mod nonsense and issued a ban.
I would not even be surprised if it now results in further bans, because the writing is on the wall.
Not to mention how many subs you mod. You are exactly what comes from Reddit and it will only continue to get worse, exactly like it was on Reddit, because power mods only move in one direction… forcing more control. Censoring more speech. Banning expressed thoughts that don’t conform to the hive mind.
I’ve seen you a thousand times. You are no different.
I didn’t ban you, an admin did, but you can go on making yourself look stupid.
If you say so big shooter.
I’m just glad that when I’m old, my knowledge of computers will be seem to be confounding wizardy to the generations behind me.
Granddad what’s an ISA?
You’ll learn about it when you are older.
Nobody needs to know about ISA now and good riddance.
I’m a Gen Z working in the Comp Sci field. Most people my age know how to work technology but don’t know how technology works.
Knowing what buttons to tap in an app to get it to do what you want is one thing. However, it’s a different pool of knowledge to understand what’s going on when those buttons get tapped.
Familiarity with tech is high, and I think that gives many in my generation a false sense of security.
Fair point, and thank you for your perspective. It’s funny for me-- I’m a Millennial from the early 90s working in Comp Sci as well, and growing up I was very worried that the next generation would be flooded with tech-knowledgeable people and I would struggle to stand out.
For better or for worse, my experience lines up very much with what you’ve described – folks who are extremely adept users, but not understanding what’s happening behind the scenes.
Could this be a case of gen z having a larger online presence than boomers? Kind of like how people from Florida are more likely to be attacked by sharks than someone from Kansas?
Edit: I somehow missed this on the first pass.
There are a few theories that seem to come up again and again. First, Gen Z simply uses technology more than any other generation and is therefore more likely to be scammed via that technology
The amount of older people having an online presence is ever increasing. And I hope the percentages mean “% of the generation members with an online presence”.
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whats the importance of that distinction when the entirety of gen z is online.
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Computer literacy needs to be a subject treated like math and science in school. It shouldn’t just be one class that older students take one year, but a class that is taken every year and escalates to more advanced topics as they get older.
And if there’s no space in the schedule, then cut back on the science classes. Who even remembers anything they learned in middle school science? Learning about sedimentary rocks and cumulonimbus clouds never helped me, personally.
Gen Z spends more than twice the amount of time on social media than boomers, and most scams are done on social media, but older people are usually easier and more lucrative targets, so it’s hard to say.
Even beyond that, we’re talking a group that has become a monetary target only in the last few years VS groups that have been larger targets for 20 to 30 years. A percentage of people in older generations have either learned from past experience or have had their “keys” taken away in a way young adults fundamentally can’t have.
I remember this being on an elementary school IQ test: Why do people in China eat more rice than people in America?
The answer was “Because there are more people in China.”
You miss 100% of the
shotsonline scams you don’ttakeget exposed to when it takes you 5 minutes to type in a url.Thats a pretty terrible question though since there are two equally valid ways of viewing the question the way it is worded. It’s not talking aboit China, it’s talking about people in China. People in South Korea eat more rice than people in Colombia despite both countries have similar populations. “Why does China consume more rice than America” is the actual question to ask yo try and get that answers.
I wonder if this is due to the rise in parasocial relationships to internet personalities?
Lots of streamers push scam grifts onto their audiences, and I see scammers also using images of Elon Musk or Mr. Beast a lot. Feels like the Gen Z equivalent of those guys who call old people and pretend to be a relative in need of bail money.
No its just lack of experience combined with over confidence. Same as traffic statistics, where the absolutely majority of accidents are by young males.
Lots of confidence, but no experience. We were all there once, so nothing strange about it.
Is cyberbullying a scam now? I feel like that might be pushing up the Gen Z numbers a bit.
Yeah, and a lot hinges on the definition of cyberbullying. If they mean a sustained and targeted campaign of bullying, that’s one thing, but if it’s just being the target of toxic behavior on the internet that’s pretty easy to trip over on social media.
