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.
What about millennials then? We spend a lot of time online and yet are doing better
We’re the ones doing the scamming
Roblox shareholders: *collective nod*
Child labor has never been easier!
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.
We don’t have 15-year-old immature brains. Gen z are lovely bunch, but many of their brains are still baking.
A significant portion of them is in their 20s now.
Brains finish developing around 25. But that’s not really the point. Many of them are young and that will move the results of the group enough.
Millennials sure lost a shit ton of money to crypto scams over the past 6 years.
The difference I think is that we grew up with the technology. We saw the democratisation of the internet which makes us generally “smarter” on that front. We also had to fiddle and understand the technology more than Gen Z has to. It’s also probably far easier to scam/get scammed nowadays with crypto bros and influencers being absolutely everywhere.