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.

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.

Dear Zoomers:

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

But goddamn you guys are slow

Young men are always more likely to fall for investment scams

Boomers wouldn't admit to falling to a scam

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.

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.

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

STOP

RAWDOGGING

RANDOM

HYPERLINKS

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Now think about that.