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.
Children easier to scam than adults, more at 11.
Gen Z is in their mid 20s now
I love the ageism in this thread and online forums in general. When there’s an article “boomers bad” everyone falls over themselves to agree. When there’s an article that (ostensibly) points the opposite way we can’t wait to tell anecdotes about how actually it’s still the boomers that are bad. There are always good reasons for this or that perceived failing of the younger generations.
To be clear I’m not defending either “side” here. The whole generation war is a ridiculous nonsense, including drawing arbitrary “gen whatever” lines at specific years.) But it goes to show how easy we are to play with stupid simplistic headlines like this even though we, especially here in the “fediverse”, like to think of ourselves as more rational / informed.
This just in: people expect more from allegedly older and wiser people (who spend a fuck ton of their time moralizing to the rest of us) than they do from younger, less experienced people.
Way to miss the point. This ridiculous “us vs them” is just the corporate media’s latest way to drive a wedge between us.
A stupid meaningless distraction to get out attention away from real issues.
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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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.
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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Boomers wouldn’t admit to falling to a scam
While we’re on the topic of shit boomers and zoomers fall for:
STOP
RAWDOGGING
RANDOM
HYPERLINKS
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So this is a genuine question. When doing research online you have to click on random websites/links. How do you protect yourself from that?
Use Firefox and run uBock Origin, Noscript, and Privacy Badger extensions. If something seems suspicious, google the url and see if people are talking about it.
i can’t use firefox and i had to turn off noscript forgot why though… i use/do everything else, so i guess i’m kind of safe.
No script is not an easy tool. By default, it breaks 99% of websites. It has become a game for me though to approve the lowest amount of scripts to make a site run, but I realize this is definitely not for everyone.
It’s me as well. Most sites aren’t so bad, but then there’s those sites with like 45 items and one of them holds the key to the video I want to watch. I feel like there should be a crowdsourced whitelist that you could download for this.
Check the url. Not what the link displays as, right click or hover that shit and see what the real url is.
Don’t follow links to sus.minemycrypto.sudan
Not even to win an internet argument.
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.
Fair point, and thank you for your perspective. It’s funny for me-- I’m a Millennial from the early 90s working in Comp Sci as well, and growing up I was very worried that the next generation would be flooded with tech-knowledgeable people and I would struggle to stand out.
For better or for worse, my experience lines up very much with what you’ve described – folks who are extremely adept users, but not understanding what’s happening behind the scenes.
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.
According to the dates provided the youngest zoomers are just now joining 8th grade. How useful is that data really?
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.
They’re also susceptible to getting their phone stolen, people accessing their computer they left open in class and a whole lot of threat vectors boomers and millenials aren’t susceptible to (or not anymore)
Also how many gen z have grown up with amazing technology but don’t really understand it at all. It just works.
Not like previous generations that had to learn more in depth to make shit work because it was buggy as hell or just plain wasn’t user friendly at all.
I feel like the numbers are mostly from all the bitcoin-type scams that so many influences have pulled.
Dear Zoomers:
I love you guys, you have so much heart and clarity of purpose.
But goddamn you guys are slow
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.
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.
I think you’re wrong about the car example. The reason people don’t know how their car works now is because so much of it involves proprietary software that you cannot fix it with physical labor. You have to understand and debug the code as well. Additionally, the manufacturers and dealerships have made accessing the parts (both on the car and replacements) so difficult that there isn’t really a universal approach to fixing the modern passenger vehicle anymore. Millenials didn’t stop fixing cars themselves out of laziness, it was because the knowledge needed to do so was greater than the cost of having a professional do it and have the repair guaranteed.
Meanwhile, though I understand that touch screen and app-based OSes are pretty difficult to program for the average consumer, it’s not the only option for computing, just a popular one. This also has nothing to do with whether what you’re downloading is safe.
Never had to debug a car I didn’t modify (and I’ve been modifying them for 40 years now).
Yea, when we add-on fuel injection or bigger turbos we alter the ECU. But daily drivers just don’t need debugging. Their failures are still mechanical systems (or sensors, which the computer then just uses defaults).
Automotive computers are some of the most rigorously tested tech out there. Even my 1974 Bendix analog fuel injection system has never “failed”. Components have, which then puts the system in fail-safe mode, like all automotive computers.
All the automation BS is another matter, which is why I refuse to own a car with that garbage. Like Tesla (or Mercedes and now upper-end of many brands). It’s simply not tested sufficiently, and I’m guessing it’s just not regulated like the “traditional” systems are.
I think you overestimate the rate of people who actually dealed with these issues. Rural car owners probably knew a lot how to do themselves, but many people still ran to the repair shop for small things (Source: my dad was a car mechanic in the 80s). In the same wake, how many kids do you think really had computers and messed around with them at the time? If half the kids in the 90s were computer nerds, nerds wouldnt have gotten bullied so much. Also the amount of millenials that i have to show around basic computer stuff at work is staggering.
So all in all we overhype the prevalence of certain lifestyles because they are overrepresented in media and stories of people in our own bubble.
Yeah exactly, I was one of only about three kids in my school year who knew how to do anything on a computer, there were some snes and megadrive owners but mostly just people didn’t even know tech existed.
The reason we weren’t getting scammed is our only contact with the outside world was a landline which we had to fight for time on even without the internet.
By the end of the 90s computer use was fairly common and people were falling for the dumbest shit, ‘if you don’t send this to five friends before midnight you’ll die’ and ‘just give me all your rare armour and I’ll double it and give it back’ The only reason we weren’t getting scammed for real money is that before PayPal the only people who could accept money online were multinational companies and banks - who all have much more elegant ways of scamming.
We were just as gullible as any other generation.
I think they may have been referring to back when cars were a new technology, like in the first half of the 20th century
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.
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.
When the low int character keeps rolling critical success on skill checks.
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.
At the end of the day the selection bias may not apply in a meaningful way as the type of boomer unable to navigate through a simple multiple choice survey would likely not be using the internet in the first place.
For example my dad is 73 and has never used a computer in his life. Worked as a gardener and never needed it for work. He sends letters to his close ones or lets me or my mom do the typing for him. So there’s 0 chance of him getting scammed.
The younger boomers and older gen X would have likely used computers for about 30 years now so would be much more adapted to it as this point. It’s not the year 2000 anymore
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.
No its just lack of experience combined with over confidence. Same as traffic statistics, where the absolutely majority of accidents are by young males.
Lots of confidence, but no experience. We were all there once, so nothing strange about it.
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.
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.
It was UO for me. My friend had that fancy golden (or maybe fire idk it was so long ago) robe for however many years of service it took and some dude tricked him out of it lmao. It was so long ago but I would 100% have fallen for the same thing at the time. I just got lucky and learned the lesson through my poor buddy
Sometimes this “dumb shit” that they fall for isn’t dumb shit that just teaches you a lesson, but rather quite predatory, such thinking you are getting blackmailed to share photos of yourself.
Fake Bad Bunny tickets got the only zoomer I know, she was out $200, but that’s not a great sanple size.
The other difference is that the measurement is “scammed ONLINE”. Boomer generation will have fewer numbers overall that are heavy participants on the Internet, which I think would increase the chances of running into an online scam.
My mom barely even knows how to use a smartphone. So she’s not likely to be involved online long enough to interact with something that would scam her. However if she DID run into a scam, I’m pretty sure my mom would 100% fall for it.
NFTs? Worked with a few young people who thought they could make money flipping those.
From the outside it seems to me that NFTs were mostly bought by millennials with disposable income for the first time in their 30s.
Gen X got scammed by that damned hustler at the Street Fighter cabinet.
Damn him, he knew the input to select Akuma! That’s no fair!
The biggest scam of my generation was PVP in the wilderness. They made it sound like it was going to be cool but all it ended up being was fascist gangs farming for GP. It was only once the Venezuelans (read: communists) unionized and kicked the gangs out did they remove PVP.
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.
Minecraft was released in 2011, when the oldest Zoomers were 14 years old, and the youngest hadn’t been born yet. Seems like a good game to associate with that generation.
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I’ve been trying to reach you all about your cars extended warranty. So glad I finally found you!
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
Was it a ransom?
It was someone pretending to be a valve employee who had shut the account down for suspicious activity and said that restoring it would cost $200. In reality the account was still active it was just spamming people with the same scam
damn
Yeah, never pay these creeps, just contact REAL staff and explain what happened
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