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.
I love the ageism in this thread and online forums in general. When there's an article "boomers bad" everyone falls over themselves to agree. When there's an article that (ostensibly) points the opposite way we can't wait to tell anecdotes about how actually it's still the boomers that are bad. There are always good reasons for this or that perceived failing of the younger generations.
To be clear I'm not defending either "side" here. The whole generation war is a ridiculous nonsense, including drawing arbitrary "gen whatever" lines at specific years.) But it goes to show how easy we are to play with stupid simplistic headlines like this even though we, especially here in the "fediverse", like to think of ourselves as more rational / informed.
This just in: people expect more from allegedly older and wiser people (who spend a fuck ton of their time moralizing to the rest of us) than they do from younger, less experienced people.