Gen Z falls for online scams more than their boomer grandparents do
Gen Z falls for online scams more than their boomer grandparents do
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.
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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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My little brother got scammed in TF2, I think he was around 12-13 years (not 100% sure). And he was promised crazy expensive skins and weapons, and they ofcource wanted to do it in 2 trades. When you're that age, you're so naive, you don't really know about scams like that.
I guess he learned a very important lesson that day haha
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Oh it happened like 5-7 years ago. Yeah, kids is unfortunately a prime target in games, because they don't know any better.
As long as their is money to be made, assholes is going to abuse it.