this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
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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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[–] [email protected] 227 points 1 year ago (12 children)

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.
[–] [email protected] 123 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Boomers could also be unaware they were victims of most of these. They think internet scams start and end with nigerian princes

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago

I mean, they did elect a meme president. What bigger scam can you think of?

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (5 children)

What about millennials then? We spend a lot of time online and yet are doing better

[–] [email protected] 95 points 1 year ago (2 children)

We're the ones doing the scamming

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Roblox shareholders: *collective nod*

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (2 children)

We don't have 15-year-old immature brains. Gen z are lovely bunch, but many of their brains are still baking.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A significant portion of them is in their 20s now.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

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?

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[–] [email protected] 104 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 69 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago

The iphone has always sacrificed user freedom to provide a streamlined experience a monkey could make work.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 65 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Dear Zoomers:

I love you guys, you have so much heart and clarity of purpose.

But goddamn you guys are slow

[–] [email protected] 66 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago

When the low int character keeps rolling critical success on skill checks.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (5 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 55 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Young men are always more likely to fall for investment scams

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago

the magic internet money was a scam sure, but collectible jpegs will surely be my ticket to easy stre- shit.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago

Boomers wouldn't admit to falling to a scam

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (10 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (8 children)

While we're on the topic of shit boomers and zoomers fall for:

STOP

RAWDOGGING

RANDOM

HYPERLINKS

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

From the generation before this, I always thought the "mobile generation"'s computer savviness had been overrated. Mobile phones (especially iOS) are like a walled garden compared to using a PC and Windows. It was easy to shoot yourself in the foot on Windows 98, etc so you learnt to be careful very quickly. Likewise, there's no jumping into the registry or terminal, no built in zip/rar handling, warnings from the OS, built in Malware protection, etc

The internet was a wild place in the 90s and this generation never really experienced that. Forums had lax moderation and could be full of troll links to "I am an idiot", goatse, etc. Files could be hosted on random webpages and the downloads could contain anything: often a virus alongside the actual file, etc

I remember not using an antivirus as Norton and co would crush your machine, so you just had to tread extremely carefully

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (19 children)

As an older member of the cohort I've noticed a certain gap. Those of us who grew up when computers were just becoming a thing for everybody (sorry gen X I know you were first but they were expensive luxuries rather than ubiquitous) had to learn to fix shit all the time and got to learn about the dangers more or less as they came into being, computers still weren't entierly user friendly and learning was encouraged by the fact that it didn't take much knowhow to do things like play an entire game by just downloading the free trial over and over and moving your save file.

Past a certain line however (I think the 2000s to 2010s kids) computers became much more of a black box and companies like apple were making 'it just works' user interfaces that required very little fixing but also gave you very little control if you didn't already know where to look. So we got that disconect of a group that are very comfortable with computers but don't understand much about how they work and get bombarded with all the dangers of the internet at once rather than having had the chance to learn them as they came about.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm a Gen Z working in the Comp Sci field. Most people my age know how to work technology but don't know how technology works.

Knowing what buttons to tap in an app to get it to do what you want is one thing. However, it's a different pool of knowledge to understand what's going on when those buttons get tapped.

Familiarity with tech is high, and I think that gives many in my generation a false sense of security.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (8 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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 ~~shots~~ online scams you don't ~~take~~ get exposed to when it takes you 5 minutes to type in a url.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Sadly, I had to pull my Gen Z sister aside to explain to her phishing when she lost her Steam account, poor girl was crying and trying to raise the funds to get her account back...

She was very happy when she got her account back, I celebrated by giving her a few games and some information on how to avoid it happening again. Thankfully there was no VAC-Ban added by the thieves.

Seriously I thought they were teaching about this thing in schools

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is cyberbullying a scam now? I feel like that might be pushing up the Gen Z numbers a bit.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

You grew up surrounded by technology and the internet. I was born in darkness. I didn't even get my first Nigerian Prince email until I was 13 years old.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I think it's just a certain type of person the non tech savvy type that are prone to getting scammed. Gen Z's life is more internet/tech focused than the boomers so there's more of them to scam.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

I feel like the numbers are mostly from all the bitcoin-type scams that so many influences have pulled.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Children easier to scam than adults, more at 11.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Gen Z is in their mid 20s now

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (8 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (4 children)

The results from this relies entirely on the honesty of those polled.

Now think about that.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

I was thinking maybe Gen Z is just more aware these things are happening?

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