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.
Hm, like most opinion pieces, there aren't any hard numbers from studies really shown besides the initial percentages. And I immediately picked up on the second paragraph's
Compared to older generations, younger generations have reported higher rates of victimization in phishing, identity theft, romance scams, and cyberbullying.
Yeah no shit those metrics will skew towards Gen Z being more victimized if you're lumping cyberbullying into the mix! They're one of the first generations that have had to deal with their peers harassing the everloving shit out of them all hours of the day online. As a millennial, I didn't have to even think about putting up with that until at least high school. I'd really want to see what questionnaire wording they were using for the survey data. If the question was legitimately "Have you ever been a victim of phishing, identity theft, romance scams, or cyberbullying?" then I think almost everyone with a social media account for their whole life would need to check "yes."
Self reporting is also notoriously unreliable
I also wonder if they controlled for the fact younger people are online more often in the first place.
Yeah no shit those metrics will skew towards Gen Z being more victimized if you’re lumping cyberbullying into the mix!
They're high in each of those categories individually, not (just) if you add the categories together and compare the totals. Millennials are slightly higher in Romance scams and identify theft though.
BUT these numbers are also self-disclosed. I'm not sure how you'd correct for this in a survey, but I could easily believe that these two generations are simply more likely to realize they've been victimized, and have a higher exposure to the internet (and thus to scams).
I'd be more interested in something like a sit-down test, to be honest. It'd be easier to account for time spent online and self-awareness of victimization, and more likely to isolate "internet street smarts", as far as I can tell.
Stupid article, most of Gen Z aren’t even 21 yet, of course they’re gonna fall for scams, they’re teenagers or younger lol. I got scammed loads of times on RuneScape as a kid, and that taught me better than anything else how to avoid scams.
Considering that Gen Z is usually defined as being born between the mid-late 1990s and early 2010s, I wouldn't support the first half of that statement. Everyone born in the first half of 2005 or earlier are 18, making them adults, so about half of Gen Z is adults.
Now whether this article uses that age range properly or whether it's just someone using the term to mean "young people", I have no idea.
But the premise of the article that just because someone uses technology all day makes them somehow invulnerable to scams (something that has absolutely nothing to do with how much someone uses tech) was ludicrous from the start.
The US census used 1997 - 2013 as the range. Which gives us an age range of 10-26, making the median age 18 - and I was thinking of 21 as adult, rather than 18 - which is why I said “they’re teenagers or younger” - but yes, you’re right, “only” 40%-ish of gen Z are under 18 :p
Run the same survey again in 11 years and compare 21+ gen Z to 2023’s boomers and I bet the results aren’t even close.
Now whether this article uses that age range properly or whether it’s just someone using the term to mean “young people”, I have no idea.
Then read the article because it literally tells you the answer in like the second paragraph lol
I got scammed by Columbia House when I was a teenager.
Oof. Brings back the memories.
Though it was expensive, my Time Life 80s Music series (CD) was worth it and I still have em all. Thankfully, it wasn't hard to cancel once I realized I was getting redundant stuff and they would never stop sending CDs as long as I kept paying.
I actually made out pretty good with them. Got my stuff. returned the stuff every month and once done dropped em.
Buying gf
The headline is pretty misleading. Reading the headline, I was imagining Nigerian Prince scams. But in the article, they state "Compared to older generations, younger generations have reported higher rates of victimization in phishing, identity theft, romance scams, and cyberbullying."
Teens get bullied more than the elderly? Say it ain't so!
While GenZ is, according to their source, also the generation with the highest percentage of victims if phishing scams, it's actually millenials that fall for identity theft and romance scams the most.
The article also states that 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."
The source for Social Catfish's claim is data released in 2023 by the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center. According to that data, in 2022, there were 15,782 complaints for internet crime by victims under 20 totaling $210.5 million in losses. In the same year, there were 88,262 complaints by victims over 60, totaling $3.1 billion in losses.
Every generation since the beginning of times has claimed that the following generation was rude, stupid, and stopped doing things the "right way" like we used to do in the good old days. It has always been bullshit, it will always be bullshit. Stop stressing, the kids are alright.
Who are these kids under 20 with $14,000 to give out to scammers? Retirees with a spare $35k, I believe, but I'd really like to see the distribution for both. I'm guessing the means and medians are very different.
Got a point there, but it's what the sources say. One possibility might be that it's the teenagers that got scammed (or even just filing the complaint?), but their parents' accounts that got emptied. This part of the report is unfortunately really lacking in detailed descriptions of the data.
"Gen Z simply uses technology more than any other generation and is therefore more likely to be scammed via that technology."
That's part of it for sure, but anecdotally I also find that Gen Z people often have quite a shallow, even naive understanding of the technology they use every day. Probably due to modern interaction design valuing simplicity above everything else.
I think that's true of any technology that goes mainstream. New tech is evolved to where the end user doesn't need to know how it works to use it.
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I'm so used to seeing damned bots spamming that everywhere, my half asleep ass immediately reached for the report button lol. It's just instinct now. Pavlov's Discord Nitro.
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Anything is free if you just grab it and walk away!
@admin this is a result of the enshittification of technology. You're no longer forced to learn, you're only displayed a button that you need to press. Doesn't matter what will the button do behind, just blindly trust that it does what it says it does.
That is not what enshitification means.
Enshitification refers to a very typical capital-driven developer pattern in which (particularly social media) platforms gradually forsake the things that make them great for their users and business partners in order to increase profits, ruining the platform in the process.
It has nothing to do with technology being easier to use. Being easier to use is better. It's about technology becoming a worse product, the opposite of being easy to use.
We should not be deliberately gatekeep technology to make it hard to use to weed out less knowledgeable users. That is some elitist bullcrap. We should hold all the platforms to a higher standard when they facilitate these scams and we should be serious about investigating and getting rid of the scammers.
I have to say that learning how to pick out the actual download button from all the other "download" buttons is one of the most crucial steps in making yourself resistant to online scams.
Really, yeah, people today use computers on more than an hourly basis. But that doesn't automatically make someone more technologically literate. It's no longer a hard requirement to understand how a computer (I'm lumping smartphones, PCs, Macs, etc.) works in order to do useful operations with it.
Install our software! Just pipe a curl download of some random script into a root shell, it’ll be fine.
lol I got trolled by that once. Luckily they just did rm -rf / instead of hacking me.
@Bitrot scams no longer mean malware anymore. Phishing is also a thing for example. And hiding full URLs from a browser's bar doesn't help with this either
That's not enshittification it is a normal progression of tech to make it useful for a wider audience. Otherwise we would be typing a byte at a time with front panel toggle switches like on a PDP-8.
This seems needlessly gatekeepy to me. Are you saying everyone using technology needs to learn exactly how it all works? People aren't allowed to just use the tools provided to them? Like are cameras worse now that you can just point and shoot vs having to go through many steps for the photo to maybe turn out ok?
@chloyster I'm sorry if I sound so. No, I do not mean to get into the technicalities of the stuff. What I meant was the fact that technology needs to be a bit more transparent about what is doing, and to have companies stop trying to hide stuff just for the sake of a better user experience. We just need to educate more people into using technology, rather than trying to make it more accessible by sacrificing some power user features and capabilities.
It's the same like knowing some basic economics to understand things like ponzi schemes or other types of scams (or simply being able to save more money).
And Windows is a huge red flag for this. Literally two OS’s working at the same time make it a shit product. One OS for legacy users who know what cmd and control panel are and the new junk system where they want to circumvent the first OS and slither all of your information to their shit tier One Drive. One Drive is iCloud without security.
Absolutely garbage and cannot wait to feel confident in a dual boot or just straight Linux because this is just stupid tech making people helpless and hamstringing them as per usual.
What are you talking about? How does an OS relate to the scams described in the article?
It sounds like they are saying that the operating system is dumbing down for its users, meaning users could be less intelligent and still use it.
@skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl and I believe two OS's refer to MacOS and Windows, in regards to how they are protecting users privacy. Furthermore I think your point on the Steam Deck is in line with that commenter is postulating; that people have been getting more stupid and less able to navigate the technology they own. I think in this commenters perfect world, the Steam Deck wouldn't have needed to have been locked down in that way.
At least, this was my takeaway from their comments. I'm not them so I can't say for sure of course.
I'm somewhere in the middle of both of you, though more with you. In terms of usability, Windows just works. For as much as I'd like to prefer Linux, I think it's absurd that I'd have to know the entirety of the ins and outs of the OS in order to use it at a basic level, which is probably rooted in growing up with GUI'd programs. I'm fine with CLI, I just get frustrated because projects I've tried using it for rarely work all the way through the guide. Basically, it feels like if you try to find any guide on Linux and any guide on Windows, the likelihood of (me) someone being able to complete that guide all the way through will likely side on Windows, due to the insanely diverse nature of Linux it feels like there's a higher chance of things going wrong due to the number of steps. By having the ability to do anything and everything, you then actually have to do everything. Also, permissions and networking are just a pain...
Personally I think that's just as crazy as having no control at all, so I'm never going to win lol.
You're comparing apples and oranges. Windows is the OS, One Drive is just a sync service (like Dropbox). They are not comparable in the least.
Or did you want to talk about Office365 or something?
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What's keeping you from switching to Linux? I only boot into my Windows install when I need effing Adobe for client work, everything else is working (mostly) smooth on Linux. Do backups with Backintime or Timshift before updating and you should be good.
I worked in fraud until it broke my soul. Yeah I believe it. The amount of young adults that fall for Facebook scams especially is pretty staggering.
I've no idea what's going on in this entire thread
A bunch of my millennial peers acting like their boomer parents with "kids these days" and "back in my dad we had common sense!" takes despite promising themselves for decades they'd have at least a tiny bit more humility than the aforementioned overly judgmental parents.
🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles: ::: spoiler Click here to see the summary “People that are digital natives for the most part, they’re aware of these things,” says Scott Debb, an associate professor of psychology at Norfolk State University who has studied the cybersecurity habits of younger Americans.
In one 2020 study published in the International Journal of Cybersecurity Intelligence and Cybercrime, Debb and a team of researchers compared the self-reported online safety behaviors of millennials and Gen Z, the two “digitally native” generations.
But because Gen Z relies on technology more often, on more devices, and in more aspects of their lives, there might just be more opportunities for them to encounter a bogus email or unreliable shop, says Tanneasha Gordon, a principal at Deloitte who leads the company’s data & digital trust business.
Staying safer online could involve switching browsers, enabling different settings in the apps you use, or changing how you store passwords, she noted.
Gordon floated the idea of major social media platforms sending out test phishing emails — the kind that you might get from your employer, as a tool to check your own vulnerabilities — which lead users who fall for the trap toward some educational resources.
But really, Guru says, the key to getting Gen Z better prepared for a world full of online scams might be found in helping younger people understand the systems that incentivize them to exist in the first place.
Saved 83% of original text. :::
Crypto moment
I am a gen-x boomer and was doing cyber bullying for a while, mostly targeting gen z. This article certainly catches the spirit of my work Maybe one day they will finally add a button that will prevent these 'online' scams, until then, be wary/where.
Why were you cyber bullying gen z kids?
I'm just picturing that South Park episode with Kyle's dad trolling.
...what?
Surveys are really interesting in that, they often find things that are quite strange, and you are left wondering who was included and who wasn't. For example, I found it kind of surprising that gen z and millennials are way more often to 'touch grass' than the older generations
but it may make sense in the context of who actually got polled - I know I wouldn't bother to fill out an online poll or one that I received in the mail without compensation, and I suspect a decent amount of disconnected individuals would feel similarly. It was an online survey, so it's not too surprising that they caught people who are connected to the internet, but its kind of surprising they found people who are rarely online.
This is a very insightful and informed take. TBH, I did NOT do my due diligence of critical thinking before posting this article. I've succumbed to knee jerk reactions once again.
