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
I mean, they did elect a meme president. What bigger scam can you think of?
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.
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
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.
Removed by mod
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.
I mean, modern applications don’t even give you an error more often than not.
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
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 overestimate the rate of people who actually dealed with these issues. Rural car owners probably knew a lot how to do themselves, but many people still ran to the repair shop for small things (Source: my dad was a car mechanic in the 80s). In the same wake, how many kids do you think really had computers and messed around with them at the time? If half the kids in the 90s were computer nerds, nerds wouldnt have gotten bullied so much. Also the amount of millenials that i have to show around basic computer stuff at work is staggering.
So all in all we overhype the prevalence of certain lifestyles because they are overrepresented in media and stories of people in our own bubble.
I think they may have been referring to back when cars were a new technology, like in the first half of the 20th century
Yeah exactly, I was one of only about three kids in my school year who knew how to do anything on a computer, there were some snes and megadrive owners but mostly just people didn’t even know tech existed.
The reason we weren’t getting scammed is our only contact with the outside world was a landline which we had to fight for time on even without the internet.
By the end of the 90s computer use was fairly common and people were falling for the dumbest shit, ‘if you don’t send this to five friends before midnight you’ll die’ and ‘just give me all your rare armour and I’ll double it and give it back’ The only reason we weren’t getting scammed for real money is that before PayPal the only people who could accept money online were multinational companies and banks - who all have much more elegant ways of scamming.
We were just as gullible as any other generation.
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.
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
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)
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”.
While that’s true, the boomers entering the “oldsphere”, to coin a term, are the ones adjacent to Gen X who weren’t scared of personal computers when they started to become a thing during the 1980s. They’re people who have been using computers in offices for the last 30+ years, and they’re very used to how they work. I genuinely think they’re less likely to fall for an online scam.
Older boomers, sure, but those are people who were, as a group (individuals are different! I can name plenty of awesome technically skilled boomers of that age group, I’m just making a generalization which for statistical purposes is reasonable) were more suspicious of computers and which contained a large number who managed to reach retirement age without going into jobs that absolutely required computer knowledge.
Those people are not the majority of people crossing the 60-65 age barrier today.
whats the importance of that distinction when the entirety of gen z is online.
This may be true. The other thing that’s been bothering me for a while is that Millennials were really the last generation to be given an understanding of how computers worked. The computers they grew up with had hierarchical file systems, file types, programs that understood both, etc.
From iTunes onwards (yes, iTunes, this didn’t even start with the cloud), there’s been an attitude of “Computers are too hard to understand so let’s dumb it down and hide everything” from computer makers. This got ramped up when everything moved to the cloud and/or mobile devices, the latter doing everything practically possible to avoid giving anyone some language in which they could understand what the computer was doing underneath.
Hell yeah, I’d expect people to fall for online scams when they’ve had the ability to understand what they’re looking at ripped away from them by a short-termist industry that’s just, today, looking for ways to charge people for stuff they could do themselves like manage their own data.
And I’ve seen this dumbing down impact other things too. People furious about the idea of using BBSes other than Reddit because… I honestly don’t know, but there’s always massive support for their opinion. People who, likewise, describe Mastodon as “too hard” because they have to pick a server. Even in tech communities, people who you’d assume had no problem picking a mobile phone carrier, or an ISP, or an email provider, have a massive problem with picking a Mastodon node, and when you talk to them, not only are you flamed to hell and back by everyone else, but it becomes clear that actually, no, they didn’t pick a mobile phone carrier, they used their parent’s. They didn’t pick an ISP, they picked Xfinity because Comcast already gave them TV. They didn’t pick an email provider, they didn’t even realize you could, they just signed up to GMail.
Ten years ago, none of this was true. People as a whole, especially those who were discussing tech topics, were not that tech ignorant. Today? We are regressing as a society.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I feel like the numbers are mostly from all the bitcoin-type scams that so many influences have pulled.
Children easier to scam than adults, more at 11.
Gen Z is in their mid 20s now
The oldest are in their mid 20s, but the youngest are tweens/early teens depending on what years you define their generation by, which is kind of a sweet spot of smart/capable enough to get themselves into trouble, but not smart enough to avoid it or get themselves out of it.
The results from this relies entirely on the honesty of those polled.
Now think about that.
I was thinking maybe Gen Z is just more aware these things are happening?
This can be said for literally all self reported polls and studies. The thing is, generally widely accepted techniques are used to attempt to account for dishonest answers. This isn’t a new problem, it’s been worked on for a long time. It’s not like scientists and pollsters have never considered that people might lie and just take it all at face value. There’s just only so much you can do about it.
The only time I ever see this brought up is with explicit intent of discrediting the poll or study in question.
It’s valid to be more skeptical of self-reported studies than studies that rely on harder evidence, but that doesn’t mean polling and self-reported studies are worthless.
That was literally my first thought.
Maybe boomers are more embarrassed about being scammed (or just more private in general), and so basing all this on a self-reported study seems like a bit of a shaky foundation.
Would be great if they had some more data that wasn’t from self-reporting…
90% of the time they’re too stupid to even realize they’ve been scammed, and yes, they’ll fall for the exact same shit twice, even three times. For a point of reference, imagine someone your age on their 4th crypto rugpull and replace that with a Nigerian prince.
Now do robo calling scams.
Robocalling or the “Hello! This is Sheriff/IRS! You will be arrested unless you pay us $200 in Amazon gift cards!”
Tbf, that’s how I get out of traffic tickets. 😅
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.
