The generation that grew up with the internet isn’t invulnerable to becoming the victim of online hackers and scammers.

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.

  • Furbag@lemmy.world
    282·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • mommykink@lemmy.world
      132·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • Ajen@sh.itjust.works
        62·
        1 year ago

        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.

    • sygnius@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • MagicPterodactyl@lemmy.ml
        4·
        1 year ago

        From the outside it seems to me that NFTs were mostly bought by millennials with disposable income for the first time in their 30s.

    • TheCuriosity@lemmy.world
      1·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml
      34·
      1 year ago

      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.