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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.
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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.
What about millennials then? We spend a lot of time online and yet are doing better
We’re the ones doing the scamming
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.
A significant portion of them is in their 20s now.
Brains finish developing around 25. But that’s not really the point. Many of them are young and that will move the results of the group enough.
Years go fast my man, gen z can be up to 26 years old
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?
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.
Nah. I consider it a public service to call out bigoted pricks like yourself.
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
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.
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
Yeah… I feel like somewhere along the way, zoomers didn’t get exposed to something essential, which millennials did get. The real problem is figuring out what that is before too many generations are lacking it.
When millennials were kids, the adults were so fascinated with their aptitude for messing with obscure DOS settings to get their games to run or programming VCRs, that the media did the tech whiz kid trope constantly (e.g. Star Trek, SeaQuest, Hackers, etc, etc). Having to deal with early electronics with arcane interfaces and fickle behavior forced them to have a comprehensive understanding.
The generation that grew up with more point and click experiences did not inspire that same “holy crap, the kids understand this really hard to use technology” and the trope in media died out. They were not forced to understand the workings of the technology to enjoy it.
Similar for cars, people who owned cars in early days pretty much had to understand the nitty gritty, because they’d screw up so often and on the road with little recourse to call for help. Nowadays people largely don’t know how their cars work, because they are more reliable and even if they have a problem on the road, they have a phone in their pocket to get professional help immediately.
I think you’re wrong about the car example. The reason people don’t know how their car works now is because so much of it involves proprietary software that you cannot fix it with physical labor. You have to understand and debug the code as well. Additionally, the manufacturers and dealerships have made accessing the parts (both on the car and replacements) so difficult that there isn’t really a universal approach to fixing the modern passenger vehicle anymore. Millenials didn’t stop fixing cars themselves out of laziness, it was because the knowledge needed to do so was greater than the cost of having a professional do it and have the repair guaranteed.
Meanwhile, though I understand that touch screen and app-based OSes are pretty difficult to program for the average consumer, it’s not the only option for computing, just a popular one. This also has nothing to do with whether what you’re downloading is safe.
Never had to debug a car I didn’t modify (and I’ve been modifying them for 40 years now).
Yea, when we add-on fuel injection or bigger turbos we alter the ECU. But daily drivers just don’t need debugging. Their failures are still mechanical systems (or sensors, which the computer then just uses defaults).
Automotive computers are some of the most rigorously tested tech out there. Even my 1974 Bendix analog fuel injection system has never “failed”. Components have, which then puts the system in fail-safe mode, like all automotive computers.
All the automation BS is another matter, which is why I refuse to own a car with that garbage. Like Tesla (or Mercedes and now upper-end of many brands). It’s simply not tested sufficiently, and I’m guessing it’s just not regulated like the “traditional” systems are.
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.
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.
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.
Boomers wouldn’t admit to falling to a scam
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.”
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.
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.
Im a middle gen z id say i defiently notice this modern tech isnt built for the average its built for the dumbest. For example I had to spend 10 minutes teaching my friend how to unzip a file also a lot of gen z dont have computers and just use thier phones for everything
I deal with a lot of kids fresh out of college. The surprising part is how many don’t know what Windows File Explorer even is, much less file manipulation. Everything is saved to the desktop.
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What’s funny is that the generation(s) that get computers understand things like the file explorer, the desktop, etc. But, they’re mostly too old to get the metaphors those are based on.
I especially think the “Desktop” metaphor is interesting. Because until laptops became common, people’s computers rested on desks. The main use for a desk in a business setting was a surface for your computer keyboard and monitor. But, the “Desktop” metaphor referenced a previous world where desktop computers didn’t exist, and the main point of a desktop surface was for writing and organizing papers.
So, there’s this tiny overlap in time where the metaphor made sense.
Like, from the 1700s to 1980s if you took a businessman and said “imagine you’re sitting at a desk in an office, what are things you’d find on that desk?” They’d talk about things like, pens, pencils, folders, documents, maybe a desktop calendar. But, you take a businessman from 1995 onwards and ask the same question they’d say things like a computer monitor, keyboard, mouse, printer, etc. The computer desktop is basically a time capsule of the time before desktops had computer equipment on them. All the metaphors are paper and paper-related things, which are no longer in much use because they’ve been replaced by a computer.
Oh yeah. When you ask people to check their downloads folder, and they open up chrome “because that’s where my downloads are”. FML.
Removed by mod
Can you reword your comment to remove the word “retarded” 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.
You grew up surrounded by technology and the internet. I was born in darkness. I didn’t even get my first Nigerian Prince email until I was 13 years old.
I feel like the numbers are mostly from all the bitcoin-type scams that so many influences have pulled.
I think it’s just a certain type of person the non tech savvy type that are prone to getting scammed. Gen Z’s life is more internet/tech focused than the boomers so there’s more of them to scam.
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Correct answer, even if boomers did use computers some, they are aging out of using them.
My dad completely stopped years ago. My mom literally just checks email from me and my sister. And it’s losing the ability to do that.
Telephone scams on the other hand…
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.Huh?
The question isn’t “why is MORE TOTAL rice eaten in China than America?”
There simply being more people in China doesn’t mean Chinese people choose to individually eat more rice. There are other reasons for that per person choice.
Both are totally legitimate interpretations. It doesn’t specify what they’re talking about beyond “people in China” which can either mean individually or collectively. It’s meant to be a trick question, though, which is why it’s worded so ambiguously.
“people in China” does not mean the same thing as " the Chinese populace".
People in China means consider the individual experience of a person, then generalize.
It does not mean “as a cumulative total”
It can definitely mean either. Sorry bro.
Cool, but that’s not how semantic coding works. I know it’s popular to say “language evolves” but logical Grammer means something still.
Sadly, I had to pull my Gen Z sister aside to explain to her phishing when she lost her Steam account, poor girl was crying and trying to raise the funds to get her account back…
She was very happy when she got her account back, I celebrated by giving her a few games and some information on how to avoid it happening again. Thankfully there was no VAC-Ban added by the thieves.
Seriously I thought they were teaching about this thing in schools
Was it a ransom?
It was someone pretending to be a valve employee who had shut the account down for suspicious activity and said that restoring it would cost $200. In reality the account was still active it was just spamming people with the same scam
damn
Yeah, never pay these creeps, just contact REAL staff and explain what happened
I mean come to think of it, it’s not that surprising. Lots of gen z started using the internet, mobile phones, etc when we were pre-teens or a little older. Even now, a good portion of gen z is still under 18. Of course that demographic would be targeted by online scammers, and of course they’d be more susceptible than adults.
It felt to me like the adults in my life didn’t have much more experience with internet-related issues than we did. It gives me a little hope that maybe we’ll be able to do a better job teaching our kids internet safety (in all its forms), since we have more experience than our parents did when we were younger.
Still, maybe not. Maybe the internet evolves too fast for that to make a difference, and maybe ten years from now we’ll be figuring out a whole new set of problems. It’s just interesting to think about imo.
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Overuse of the internet and social media doesn’t destroy critical thinking skills. Critical thinking skills is something a lot of people don’t have in the first place and need to be taught. We aren’t naturally born knowing how to not be scammed.
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Granted there weren’t that many scammers back in the early 2000s, but I never got scammed.
Or maybe they were really good scammers and you don’t even realize it to this day.
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